When BBM reached its pinnacle, everybody was on it and everybody was PINGING! It didn’t matter if you are in the middle of a lecture, in a meeting or on a date, your phone never stopped ringing or should I say, PINGING. At its peak, there were nearly 43 Million BBM users with over 70% of them BBMing every day; but then Android phones took over the market with a basket of features Blackberry didn’t offer and that soon led to Blackberry’s demise. However, when everyone thought the ship had sunk, they pulled out their trump card, BBM. Even though the hardware section wasn’t doing well, they knew that BBM was their saving grace and they made it available on iOS and Android for the world to see and thus began the resurrection of BBM.

Messenger services like Whatsapp, Line and WeChat had caught up by then and gained a huge lead on BBM. Whatsapp currently is the largest messenger service with over 300 Million active users (data as of August ’13) but there has been a shift in users moving from Whatsapp to BBM. This shift is mainly because of these two reasons;

The ‘Last Seen’ Feature, and

Open Profile

Many users have switched just because the fact that the people on their list could see when they were online last on Whatsapp and this has caused a lot inconvenience to its users. The other fact that anyone who has your mobile number can view your profile on Whatsapp was a problem! These very reasons gave BBM the edge it needed (as a BBM pin gives access only to a BBM profile which does not disclose any personal information, not even their mobile phone numbers) and the shift began!