BlackBerry Messenger
BBM: PINs, the D and the R, the messenger that made the BlackBerry, licensed to an Indonesian company and closed in 2019
BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, was the instant messaging service built into BlackBerry phones from 1 August 2005, using device PINs and RIM's network to deliver messages with the famous D and R receipts. It reached tens of millions of users, drove BlackBerry's consumer boom, launched on iOS and Android on 21 October 2013 with 20 million downloads in a week, and was licensed to Indonesia's Emtek in 2016. The consumer service closed on 31 May 2019; the paid BBM Enterprise continued.
Timeline [edit]
- 2005
-
1 August 2005
Launch
BBM ships on BlackBerry
PIN-to-PIN messages with the D and the R.
- 2009
-
6 October 2009
Version
BBM 5
Groups, pictures, barcodes to add contacts.
- 2011
-
10 October 2011
Incident
The three-day outage
BBM down across Europe, the Middle East and India.
- 2013
-
21 October 2013
Launch
BBM for iOS and Android
20 million downloads in a week.
- 2014
-
31 December 2014
Peak
About 90 million monthly users
- 2016
-
27 June 2016
other
Consumer BBM licensed to Emtek
BlackBerry keeps BBM Enterprise.
- 2019
-
18 April 2019
Shutdown announced
Emtek to close BBM consumer
"Users have moved on to other platforms".
-
31 May 2019
Shutdown
BBM consumer closes
BBM Enterprise offered to consumers instead.
The site through time
Browse bbm.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
Ownership [edit]
Key figures [edit]
| Metric | Value | As of | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users ▲ | 91 million | 2014 | Reported Monthly active users reported by BlackBerry in 2014 |
Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate
Why it shut down [edit]
Official line: Emtek, the Indonesian media group that had licensed the consumer BBM from BlackBerry in 2016, announced on 18 April 2019 that the service would close on 31 May 2019: "users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on". BlackBerry offered its paid BBM Enterprise to consumers as a replacement, and that product survives. By the end BBM's remaining users were largely in Indonesia, where it had once been the default messenger.
Our analysis: BBM was the first mobile messenger most people used, with delivery and read receipts, PIN-to-PIN privacy and, on BlackBerry hardware, no equal from 2005 to about 2011. It was also the last reason to buy a BlackBerry, and RIM treated it that way, refusing to put it on other phones until October 2013, by which time WhatsApp had 300 million users and iMessage was two years old. The cross-platform launch was a hit that changed nothing, and the Emtek deal was a way to stop paying for a product that had become a memory.
History [edit]
PIN to PIN
Gary Klassen at Research In Motion built BlackBerry Messenger as a side project, and it shipped on 1 August 2005 for BlackBerry handhelds: a chat client that used each device's PIN rather than a phone number, sent messages over RIM's own network for free, and marked them D when delivered and R when read. On phones sold to executives that made it a curiosity; on the consumer BlackBerrys of 2007 to 2011, the Curve, the Pearl, the Bold, it made the phone. Teenagers traded PINs, groups formed around it, and in Britain and Indonesia in particular a BlackBerry was a BBM machine. It was blamed for organising the 2011 London riots and became the reason RIM was pressed by governments for access.
BBM 5 (2009) added groups and pictures, BBM 6 (2011) let apps hook in, and BBM Music, BBM Voice and BBM Video followed. The October 2011 outage that took BBM down for days across Europe, the Middle East and India showed how much traffic ran through it. But it ran only on BlackBerrys, and by 2012 WhatsApp, iMessage, Kik and Line had taken the idea to everyone else's phone.
Cross-platform, then licensed away
RIM announced in May 2013 that BBM would come to iOS and Android, and after a botched September attempt it launched on 21 October 2013 with 20 million downloads in a week and, briefly, the top spot in the app stores. It reached about 90 million monthly users in 2014, added stickers, channels and payments, and never got past the platforms that had already won. In June 2016 BlackBerry licensed the consumer BBM to Emtek of Indonesia, its strongest market, and kept the corporate BBM Enterprise for itself; Emtek moved the service to Google Cloud and tried to make it a super-app with news, games and payments. On 18 April 2019 Emtek announced the end: BBM consumer would close on 31 May 2019. BlackBerry offered BBM Enterprise, at $2.49 for six months, to anyone who wanted the D and the R back.
The domain today
bbm.com redirects to BlackBerry's page for BBM Enterprise, the paid corporate messenger that outlived the consumer product.
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Sources [edit]
- August 1 marks the 10th anniversary of BBM CrackBerry 27 July 2015 [archived]
- BlackBerry service crash affects BBM messaging for millions The Guardian 10 October 2011
- BlackBerry to launch BBM on iOS and Android this summer ZDNet 14 May 2013 [archived]
- 5 million people downloaded BBM for iOS, Android in just 8 hours Mashable 22 October 2013 [archived]
- Looking back at the last 10 years of BBM BlackBerry 30 July 2015 [archived]
- The consumer version of BBM is shutting down on May 31 TechCrunch 18 April 2019 [archived]
- BlackBerry Messenger is shutting down in May Engadget 19 April 2019 [archived]
- How BlackBerry Messenger forever changed the way we text Inverse 9 May 2023 [archived]
Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).