BBM for Android and iOS Officially Delayed, Not Coming this Week

Finally, after announcing it has accepted a buyout offer from Canadian consortium Fairfax Financial, BlackBerry issued an official statement regarding the botched BlackBerry Messenger launch from last weekend.

For those unfamiliar with the subject, BlackBerry announced a week ago it will launch its popular BBM application on both Android and iOS platforms during the weekend, but due to unforseen problems, the Canadian company had to completely removed the iOS version from App Store and shut down its servers.

Unfortunately, BlackBerry did not offer any explanations on why it stopped the rollout of BBM for iOS or why it did not release the Android version in Google Play Store until today, 48 hours after the incident occurred.

Well, as suspected, it appears that the unreleased Android version of BBM is the main cause of the issue, as lots of Android users downloaded this never released app that leaked a few days before the official launch and stressed BlackBerry's servers in abnormal ways.

Here is what Andrew Bocking, head of BBM at BlackBerry, has to say about the release BlackBerry Messenger for iOS and Androir.

“Last week, an unreleased, older version of the BBM for Android app was posted on numerous file sharing sites. We were aware of an issue with this unreleased version of the BBM for Android app.

This older version resulted in volumes of data traffic orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user and impacted the system in abnormal ways. The version we were planning to release on Saturday addressed these issues, however we could not block users of the unreleased version if we went ahead with the launch.

We attempted to address the problems caused by the unreleased version throughout the day on Saturday, but as active users of the unreleased app neared a million – and accelerated – it became clear that the only way to address the issue was to pause the rollout for both Android and iPhone.

The team is now focused on adjusting the system to completely block this unreleased version of the Android app when we go live with the official BBM for Android app. We are also making sure that the system is reinforced to handle this kind of scenario in the future. While this may sound like a simple task – it’s not. This will take some time and I do not anticipate launching this week.”