A few days ago was the scheduled release date for BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) on Android and iOS, however, BlackBerry has seen it fit to postpone the launch of the app. The reason for this postponement is due to a premature leak of the BBM app for Android devices, which as head of BBM, Andrew Bocking, puts it, “resulted in volumes of data traffic orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user and impacted the system in abnormal ways”. This statement was posted on the BlackBerry blog yesterday, and the leaked BBM is referred to here as an “older version”. So there you have it, leaked, unfinished app got out early and put unexpected loads on the BlackBerry servers. End of story? Perhaps not.
I am a little sceptical that the cause of this delayed release is related to the fact the leaked app was older or if it really was related to this, is not the primary reason that caused so many issues. Firstly, BlackBerry says it is unable to block users of the leaked app remotely, though had the official release gone ahead and there were similar issues, I assume they would have a contingency plan for this exact scenario. Second of all is the fact that over a million users managed to get onto the BBM servers, but this was only Android phones. If BlackBerry wasn’t ready for this number of users on their systems, albeit acting unusually, then it could be down to a lack of preparedness.
Whether intentional or not, the postponement is the perfect vehicle for BlackBerry to buy more time to improve their servers to handle a higher than expected load. That’s just my 2 cents though: let us know what you think about this whole leaked BBM debacle in the comments.
Source: BlackBerry Blog via Twitter
