The consumer version of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) is going to expire on May 31, announced Emtek Group today.
BBM‘s success coincided with Blackberry as a brand for years as the former gained mainstream appeal and became the most popular messaging app in the world. Nevertheless, Blackberry’s fall from grace resulted in the reduction of the popularity of the BBM as well.
The advent of other messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Telegram, and many others resulted in an eventual decline in popularity for BBM. 2016 saw Emtek Group acquiring BBM in hopes of turning things around, unfortunately, to no avail. The BBM experience got worse due to the inclusion of channels, games, and ads.
In the announcement today about the eventual doom of BBM, Emtek Group talked about the difficulties in facing competition with the aforementioned messaging service and its inability to bring new BBM users. Emtek did not divulge into the details about the current number of BBM users, though the service was reported to have 63 million monthly users in Indonesia as of January 2018.
The FAQ page from BBM has been updated to say that users won’t be able to use BBmoji after May 31 and existing rewards after May 20. The page also notes that Emtek will be deleting like channels and feeds within seven days of the service shutting down and data from its cloud infrastructure within 180 days.
Notwithstanding, messages and files like photos, documents, and videos are stored on BBM service until the user directs them. Since these files are destroyed in seven days they will cease to appear after that given time whether or not users download them.
Notably, only BBM’s consumer version is shutting down. BBM Enterprise has been listed on Google Play Store. BBM Enterprise is free for the first year and costs $2.49 for six months of service.
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