BlackBerry announced today that it will open up its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) instant-messaging program to iOS and Android users for free, with new clients coming for those platforms later this summer.
"We will make BBM available as the premiere multiplatform messaging solution all around the globe, and even better, it's free," BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said at the BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando, FL. "This is such a great experience, it's just too good to keep it only to ourselves."
Because it's a BlackBerry exclusive, BBM has only 60 million active users. It's dwarfed by Android/iOS competitors like WhatsApp and Viber, which measure their user bases in the hundreds of millions. But BBM users are highly engaged, sending and receiving more than 10 billion messages per day, Heins said.
BBM for iOS and Android will start with messaging and groups features, but will roll out "feature parity" including voice calling, screen sharing, and video calling later this year, Heins said. It will be available for devices running iOS 6 and Android 4.0 or higher.
BBM Gets 'Channels'
The cross-platform BBM will also include "channels," a new BBM-based social network that will let businesses and celebrities create affinity groups, Heins said. Some of the initial channels include a Formula 1 car team, BlackBerry itself, and the musical artists Alicia Keys, Goo Goo Dolls, and Tegan and Sara. (Some of the channels are shown in the image above.)Heins did a demo of Channels, which seem to function a little like Facebook fan pages. If you subscribe to a channel, you can see all of that person's updates, talk back to them and see what other followers are saying. You can also create your own channels, where you control the content and which can have an unlimited number of followers.
"Imagine the dialogue that can now exist between the BBM users and the businesses, celebrities and groups that they're passionate about," Heins said.
BBM Channels is in beta right now, with a commercial launch coming later this summer, Heins said.
Also at BlackBerry Live, the company announced a new lower-cost QWERTY phone, the Q5, and new business server software. See the slideshow above for more.