Rather than running the risk of losing users of its BlackBerry Messenger app, which has been available for both Android and iOS for some time, the Canadian company has dropped the subscription fees for its “retract” and “timer” functions.
BlackBerry Messenger responds to Snapchat and others?
Snapchat includes so many security options for free that it appears that BlackBerry felt it necessary to simply waive the fee on a few of its messenger functions.
While BlackBerry has certainly fallen on hard times in the last five years, it’s remained relevant given its enterprise offerings and security. But, when it released BBM to Android and iOS it was clear that it was looking for additional revenue streams. One of those was the paid add-ons available for BBM.
While the company is still charging for custom PINs user IDs and ad removal as well as stickers, the “retract” function along with “timer” have been made completely free. Retract allows you to remove your message from the recipients phone (assuming no screen shot was taken) and timer allows for a timed deletion, a feature that Snapchat offers for free.
Snapchat went the other way in 2013, by charging users if they wanted to view a message that had “self-destructed” for a second time. The company also offers a number of other paid add-ons to its core messenger.
In addition to giving away the two aforementioned features, there were a few more changes in BBM made today. For Android, BBM is now supported for those running Marshmallow (Android 6.0), users can now mute notifications in for group chats, and the new version released today also allows for the viewing of all photos sent between two users and the ability to batch save photos to your Android device.
The new iOS BBM app now allows for iPhone and iPad users to both record and share larger videos along with a couple of other features.
While BBM isn’t making much money off its messaging app, it is nice to see that they continue to support it for those who remain loyal to the app but have likely not bought a BlackBerry for some time.
