The good news for BlackBerry’s cross-platform messaging OTT push continues as the company announced BBM has now hit 80 million monthly active users.
BlackBerry last week unleashed the long-awaited Android and iOS versions of BBM and saw 10 million downloads in the first 24 hours. Now the company is saying that opening up the messaging app to Android and iOS has resulted in the addition of 20 million active users in about a week’s time.
Despite the rapid user-base growth, BBM is still well behind other more popular OTT messaging apps like WhatsApp, which this summer announced it had hit 250 million monthly active users.
Still, the successful launch of BBM comes as a much-needed positive for BlackBerry as it continues to court itself to potential buyers. The latest report from the Wall Street Journal said that BlackBerry recently met with Facebook to discuss a possible bid.
BlackBerry is still tentatively in agreement with Fairfax Financial for a $4.7 billion buyout that would take the struggling OEM private.