It's been a bit of a bumpy road to BBM on all platforms.
Poor BlackBerry. Though the company announced major layoffs on Friday afternoon, things were supposed to look up on the weekend with the release of BBM for iOS and Android. Though the iOS roll-out started as planned, it was soon halted, and the Android roll-out never got off the ground at all. BlackBerry said that an unreleased version of the BBM for Android app that leaked early "caused issues" and that it would keep users posted on a release.
Unfortunately, it seems that release won't be anytime soon. Andrew Bocking, head of BBM at BlackBerry, has said he doesn't anticipate launching BBM for Android this week. Bocking says that the unreleased version of BBM for Android was an older version and that it contained an issue that resulted in higher than normal data traffic for each active user. This in turn impacted the system after one million people downloaded the unofficial app. The Saturday version addressed these issues, but BlackBerry wouldn't be able to block the users of the unreleased version if the new, official release was launched.
Bocking says there's a team working on blocking the unreleased version when the official BBM for Android app goes live and reinforcing the system so that something like this doesn't happen again in the future. The moral of the story is that good things come to those who wait. And we're going to be waiting a while. Unfortunately, Bocking didn't mention how or why this affects the launch of the BBM for iPhone application, just that it had to be paused as a result of the issue with Android, so it looks like iPhone users are going to be waiting too.
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