The instant messaging space has drawn a lot of interest, attracting more than $200-million (U.S.) in venture capital investment in the past year, while Line is reportedly eyeing a public offering that is expected to value it in the billions of dollars.Īs they have expanded, instant messengers have become a headache for wireless carriers, as users don't pay for most chat apps, avoiding basic texting offered by the carriers. Gadway said BlackBerry has the potential to catch up to its much larger rivals, as 'there isn't really one runaway dominant instant messaging app.' 'There's a good chance BlackBerry could have owned this market,' said Matt Golden, a Toronto-based venture capitalist whose Golden Venture Partners focuses on investing in mobile commerce companies.

Even Kik Interactive, another Waterloo, Ont., company started by a former BlackBerry co-op student, has 90 million monthly users. China's WeChat, Line from Japan and Silicon Valley-based WhatsApp each boast more than 200 million users. So a number of other players developed similar apps, and some are now far more popular than BBM. It gave users, whose identities were protected by a unique and anonymous code, the ability to instantly know when messages were delivered and opened.īut when rival Apple and Android smartphones gained in popularity, BlackBerry decided against making the service available to those users. The app is free, and other players have moved ahead of BlackBerry in the instant-messaging race.īBM was the first instant mesenger exclusively for mobile devices and became hugely popular and a driver of device sales in the late 2000s. The millions of new BBM users are in addition to the 60 million already using the service on their BlackBerrys.īut it's not clear how BlackBerry will make money from the new service. The rush for the new BBM app is a welcome moment for the Waterloo, Ont., company, which has been clobbered by competitors in the smartphone market. 'We have absolutely incredible demand we're trying to manage,' BlackBerry spokesman Jeff Gadway said. The company says it is processing new users at a rate of 500,000 an hour, with millions more queued up. The company said more than 10 million people signed up for the BlackBerry Messenger service in the first 24 hours after its release on Monday for non-BlackBerry users.

Finally, some good news from BlackBerry Ltd.: Its popular instant messaging app appears to be a hit among Android and Apple smartphone users.

Free texting app for blackberry