Leaked Video Shows BBM for Android in Its Test Phase

At the beginning of August I wrote that BlackBerry was going to begin a private beta for running BlackBerry Messenger on Android devices. At that time, it was announced that BlackBerry would be giving the Android version to friends who were nominated by BlackBerry employees.

The goal was to have the beta version tested and all bugs fixed for a Sept. 21 release date. That would pretty much comply with getting the product out by end of summer this year. Somehow it is not surprising that although this was a “private” not to be shared with the public beta testing, that a video has been leaked out.

In June 2013, I wrote that BlackBerry launched its Secure Enterprise Environment for Android and iOS. From this article and subsequent conversations with BlackBerry, I got the impression that it was trying to move away from being considered a device manufacturer and start moving into the area of getting its software to work across OS platforms.

BlackBerry Messenger is and always has been its most popular app. Now BlackBerry is trying to make it even popular by extending it into the Android OS. For all intended purposes, the BBM app for Android runs just as it does on a BlackBerry smartphone.

While it was slightly re-designed to work with the touchscreen keyboard of Android smartphones, the functionality of the BBM app is the same. This means that Android users will have to learn to use the app.

It takes a little while to get used to it, but it is fairly intuitive so most users should not have any problems getting comfortable with it quickly. One of the BlackBerry features allows you to transfer contacts using near field communication (NFC). This was ported over so you can also use it if your Android device supports it.

A video was leaked out by one of the testers and was up on the CrackBerry site for a while. It has since been removed due to a request from BlackBerry. If you want to see the video you can hopefully view the one below, but it seems to be disappearing from websites as I am writing this article.

According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, there is a possibility that BlackBerry may be looking to have BBM be its own company. We could be looking at BBM Inc. sometime in the near future. This BlackBerry subsidiary would be solely focused on delivering BBM across BlackBerry, Android and iOS platforms.

This could be another indication as I mentioned above that BlackBerry is trying to be known for its applications like BES 10 and BBM 10 and not just for its devices.