BlackBerry will probably not be rolling out its BlackBerry Messenger app to iOS and Android for the rest of this week. A blog post by Andrew Blocking, head of BBM at BlackBerry, went into more detail about the Android leak and why the company decided to temporarily pull the app from distribution just hours after it first launched on iOS.
An older and unreleased version of BBM for Android was put onto file sharing sites before its official launch, according to Blocking, one said to have an “issue.” The distributed app caused “volumes of data traffic orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user and impacted the system in abnormal ways.” BlackBerry also apparently could not block the older version if it continued to launch the newer, issue-free version on the weekend, but once user numbers hit one million, it “became clear that the only way to address the issue was to pause the rollout for both Android and iPhone.”
While the BBM team is working on blocking the leaked app from accessing their servers, it is also attempting to reinforce its own systems in order to cope with unexpectedly-high user numbers. This does come at a price, with Blocking advising “I do not anticipate launching this week.”
Though the Android version is blocked completely, users that were able to get hold of the iOS app before its withdrawal from the App Store are able to continue using it.
