RIM Explains Why BBM For Other Platforms is NOT On the Road Map

bbm_mastDuring a Q&A session with Mike Kirkup from Research in Motion (RIM) and a panel that included developers from Foursquare, Polar Mobile,Poynt, Wikitude, and a few others RIM touched on the subject of BBM for other platforms. The session was interesting the guys shared their experience of working with the Webworks SDK. It seems RIM is moving in the right direction attracting good developers while empowering the current ones.

One of the key questions that stood out to me was "When is BBM going cross platform or to the PC? Kirkup was straight forward and said that there was no plan or intentions of doing either. The reason being is that BBM is a key to attracting customers to BlackBerry. Another reason is the fact that the infrastructure that runs BBM is internal and taking it outside of RIM’s would be probably a really bad idea. I am not saying it couldn’t happen but i do not see how doing that would benefit them. There are quite a few apps already do that but not as good as BBM. If RIM really wanted to do that it would make more sense to maybe buy one of the 3rd party developers such as live profile or Whatsapp and simply give it access to API’s that would allow others to use that app to send messages to BBM users and vise versa. But I believe BBM needs to stay in-house.

We recorded most of the Q&A session so if you are a developer we encourage you to watch the video. You may find some interesting information on it. If you are interested on hearing about the BBM questions skip to 4 minutes on the video, the video is quite long.

 

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