BBM a rage, 10 mln downloads in 24 hrs

The struggling smartphone maker had on Tuesday resumed the rol-lout of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).

“It’s been 24 hours since we resumed the launch of BBM for Android and iPhone. And what a day it's been! We’ve already had more than 10 million downloads of BBM,” BlackBerry executive vi-ce president (BBM) Andrew Bocking said in a post on the company’s official blog.

In September, BlackBerry had paused the global rollout of its instant messaging service BBM on rival phones, blaming the delay on issues caused by an unreleased old version of BBM (BlackBerry Messenger).

“When we saw almost one million people install an unreleased version of the Android version, another million use work-arounds to download BBM onto their iPhones and another six million people pre-register to know when BlackBerry Messenger became available for iPhone and Android, we knew we were on to something huge,” he noted.

The application has also seen ‘overwhelmingly po-sitive reviews’ on Google Play and the App Store.

BBM has earned 60,000 five-star reviews on Google Play from about 87,000 reviews, he added.

On Apple’s App Store, BBM rose quickly in the free app rankings in the first 24 hours, taking the number one slot in more than 75 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Indonesia and most of the Middle East, Bocking said.

BlackBerry said that it will add more new features to its instant messaging service to promote it as the private social network.