Blackberry says no ETA on BBM for Android; we say there’s no ETA for our patience

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Blackberry says no ETA on BBM for Android; we say there’s no ETA for our patience

Over the weekend, you may have heard of an unfortunate episode that affected the official launch of Blackberry Messenger for Android and iOS. A leaked version of the application was made available to the eager public, except this build wasn’t one meant to be released.

A bug inside this build caused the million or so people who downloaded the app to put extra strain on Blackberry’s servers, rendering BBM inoperable for many people (including those using the service on devices like the Blackberry Q10 and Z10).

Unfortunately for us, Blackberry had to delay launch to figure out how to deal with the overload that this incident caused. Head of BBM Andrew Blocking has more details in regards to what happened, and gives us an update on when to expect the official arrival. Hint: it isn’t pretty.

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 will have to make some system-level changes that will be able to detect and block certain versions of the app to ensure users aren’t using unofficial versions. It’s not a simple task, Blocking says, with the software engineer telling folks that there is no ETA on another attempt to launch. It certainly won’t be this week, and they aren’t promising it will be next week or the week after that.

Simply put, we’re in limbo. Blackberry Messenger is still not released, and we don’t know when it will be. At this point, we’re starting to lose the little bit of interest we had left (as Raveesh clearly stated in a spirited rant about the whole ordeal this past weekend).

[via Blackberry]

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