The problems keep piling up for BlackBerry Ltd., as the once dominant Canadian smartphone company announced that the release date for the BlackBerry Messenger app on iOS and Android would be delayed until next week.
BlackBerry Messenger, one of the only properties that BlackBerry Ltd. feels is strong enough to possibly spin off into its own subsidiary, was supposed to be released for iOS and Android over the past weekend.
Instead, an unofficial Android version of BBM hit the internet on Saturday, garnering up to a million downloads on file-sharing sites.
In a blog post for BlackBerry, executive vice president of BBM, Andrew Bocking, explained the reason for the delay, stating, "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."
Bocking continued, "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."
The unofficial Android BBM App overworked BlackBerry's networks, and so now everyone has to wait for the inefficient version of the BBM app to fully clear the system. However, much like how Netflix pays attention to pirating sites to make sure the titles they're securing are popular, the popularity of the unofficial BBM app showed a lot of interest from Android users.
"We attempted to address the problems caused by the unreleased version throughout the day on Saturday," said Bocking, "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 BBM team is hopeful that it will learn from the BBM release glitch, but in the meantime, BBM systems for iOS and Android cannot support a roll out of the app.
"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," said Bocking. "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.
This is just one in a string of bad news for BlackBerry Ltd. recently. After cutting almost 40 percent of its workforce, according to PC Mag, BlackBerry went up for sale on Monday, and a group of investors led by the Canadian company Fairfax Financial announced it would buy BlackBerry for $4.7 billion to take it off the public market. It appears that the attempt this year to reinvigorate BlackBerry - by announcing a new operating system, smartphone lineup, and changing the name of the company - has been mostly a failure.