BlackBerry says BBM for Android and iOS won’t relaunch this week as blocking leaked app ‘will take some time

The botched BlackBerry Messenger for Android and iOS launch won’t be resolved anytime soon. BlackBerry today says it doesn’t expect it will be able to relaunch its flagship app for Apple’s and Google’s mobile platforms this week, and it wouldn’t commit to a specific date for when it would be able to.

BBM was supposed to launch on Android on September 21 and on iOS on September 22. Instead, it launched on iOS on September 21, and then was pulled after an “unreleased, older version” of the Android app leaked to numerous file sharing sites.
The leaked app resulted in volumes of data traffic “orders of magnitude higher than normal” for each active user and impacted BlackBerry’s backend system “in abnormal ways.” While the latest BBM for Android app performed as expected, BlackBerry said it could not block users of the unreleased version if it went ahead with the launch. As a result, BlackBerry stopped the show for both platforms.
Here’s the current status:

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.

The only good news here is that the BBM brand is still strong. With only an official iOS app and an unofficial Android one, BlackBerry says it saw more than 1.1 million active users, a number that was still accelerating in growth after the first 8 hours.
We’ll let you know when BlackBerry gets its act together and manages to finally launch BBM as a cross-platform app. It could be key to the company being acquired for $4.7 billion.