When it comes to instant messaging platforms, WhatsApp appears to be leading the way with 600 million active users, a number which WhatsApp’s new owner, Facebook, believes could hit as many as 2-3 billion users in the future. That being said, how does BBM fare, especially given that it was launched much earlier?
Well speaking at the company’s Q2 fiscal 2015 earnings call, BlackBerry’s CEO John Chen revealed that BBM had managed to hit 91 million monthly active users, a rise from the last estimate which was revealed to be 85 million, thus showing that BlackBerry’s messaging platform had grown by 6 million.
There are a couple of reasons why BBM has grown. BlackBerry has included new features such as BBM Protected, BBM Money, and the inclusion of stickers probably helped to make it more attractive to younger users as well. BBM was also recently launched on the Windows Phone platform which probably helped it gain more users in the process.
At this rate, it seems that BBM is still pretty far behind WhatsApp in terms of active users, but with the BlackBerry Passport selling out and with a lot of positive reviews received, we wouldn’t be surprised if BBM started to gain more users as customers think about giving the Passport (and BlackBerry’s services) a try.
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