A lot of the BlackBerry headlines this week focused on the Leap, the company’s new low cost smartphone, but BlackBerry has talked a lot over the last few months about how it plans to make money off of its services, including BBM. This was something that was discussed at CES as well as MWC. But to make money, you first need to have the users.
Getting BBM users on BlackBerry is easy. The app comes pre-installed on every handset. Other platforms are where growth becomes more difficult. BlackBerry, it seems, is doing fine in that regard, too. The company announced today via its official blog that it has hit 100 million installs via Google Play in just over a year of availability.
BlackBerry Senior VP Matthew Talbot says this figure puts BBM in the top tier of messaging applications on Google Play. The news comes just after the release of BBM 2.7 for Android, which came out Monday and offers Android Wear support as well as custom PINs and the option to remove ads for a small fee every month.
Talbot also revealed in today’s post that BBM users have officially sent more than a billion stickers and says the BBM Store continues to pull in a billion virtual goods impressions every month.
The above figures are based on overall BBM use, not just the activity of Android users, but it’s important to note that while BBM has 100 million downloads via the Play Store, this doesn’t account for Android users that installed the app from third party sources, like the Amazon App Store.
[source]Inside BlackBerry[/source]
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