BBM, the chat app formerly known as BlackBerry Messenger, is shutting down next month.
“Though we are sad to say goodbye, the time has come to sunset the BBM consumer service, and for us to move on,” said Emtek, the Indonesian media conglomerate that took over BBM from BlackBerry mid-2016, in a blog post.
Photo credit: Tech in Asia
May 31 is shutdown day.
BBM was Indonesia’s most downloaded app for several years, which made sense for Canada’s BlackBerry to hand over the license for it to Emtek. The Indonesian firm then added a number of features to BBM – such as online payments – with an eye to turning it into a super app like WeChat.
But users started fleeing BBM in droves around September and October 2017, when the app dropped out of Indonesia’s top 10 Android apps and then plummeted dramatically, as seen in data from App Annie:
Today, BBM is Indonesia’s 318th most popular app on iOS and 500th on Android. WhatsApp is the nation’s top social app, ranked second overall.
“We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date,” added Emtek in its post. “The technology industry, however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on.”
Die-hard BBMers could try out BlackBerry’s workplace-oriented BBMe – a separate app – which requires a paid subscription.
Editing by Charmaine de Lazo
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