4 reasons BlackBerry phones will die in Indonesia (but BBM will still reign supreme)

Credit: blog.laptopmag.com

Today BlackBerry resumes the launch of its highly anticipated BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) for Android and iOS. While that’s great news for a lot of Indonesians who can now communicate with their BBM-using friends on Android and iOS, the same cannot be said for the fate of BlackBerry’s hardware.

BBM can retain crown

Despite its late arrival cross-platform and many other setbacks, I still believe BBM can retain its title of Indonesia’s king of messaging apps. The three reasons are simple:

• First, BBM is still the number one messaging app in the country, and that can still draw in new users from the ‘network effect’ ¹.
• Second, BBM is used by many merchants in Indonesia to conduct transactions with thousands of their BBM contacts, so moving away from BBM would be very difficult for them.
• And third, local handset manufacturers will start pre-installing the new BBM app onto their Android phones, which indirectly promotes the usage of BBM as well. The newest handset from Indonesia’s Cyrus is a good example. Called Cyrus Chat (pictured right), the Android phone has a physical QWERTY keyboard and comes, as it advertising blares, with BBM pre-installed.

All of the above reasons point toward a positive trend of more BBM usage in Indonesia in the near future.

Even without key features, BBM will still be used

Of course, BBM for Android and iOS doesn’t offer some fun features like stickers, social games, free calls, and video calls – unlike WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, and many other fast-growing messaging apps. But it’s very typical for Indonesians to use multiple chat apps at the same time. If it’s not number one, BBM can still be one of the main chat apps in Indonesia.

The main issue for BBM is its consistency. Up until the time of writing, there are a lot of BBM errors and outages happening because the servers cannot withstand the surge of today’s new users.

Gloomy future for BlackBerry handsets

Whatever happens in the long term to BBM depends on BlackBerry and its uncertain fate. So while the BBM app/service is on the verge of revival in Indonesia, its handsets are still on course for some gloomy days. Here are four reasons for that:

1. No more exclusive features on BlackBerry handsets

The three things that made BlackBerry hugely popular a few years back were the handsets’ push-email feature, physical QWERTY models, and BBM. These three features are no longer exclusive to BlackBerry.

More and more handset manufacturers will emulate Cyrus – pre-installing the BBM app onto Android phones and marketing them as BlackBerry replacements. This encourages users to move on from their BlackBerry phones.

2. Bad handset experience

3. Bad resale value

4. Low confidence in BlackBerry OS