BBM: The Messenger is already dead

Most companies would kill for 10 million app downloads, especially if it’s widely believed to be on a one-way trip to the morgue. The otherwise moribund BlackBerry hit this mark last week, claiming 10 million downloads of its BBM app, which finally rolled out to iOS and Android users after last month’s false start. Despite its dwindling market, BBM is understandably popular among BlackBerry users– it’s long been one of the few personal apps for the device, and it’s not like other messaging options are available on the platform.

Still, the notion of a cross-platform BBM had strong emotional appeal, and it was apparently a key issue in co-founder Jim Balsillie’s departure from BlackBerry earlier this year. Balsillie believed it would save the company, while CEO Thorsten Heins thought it would distract from the need to fix BlackBerry’s smartphone platform. Heins won, but users didn’t adopt the new BlackBerry 10 platform, despite decent reviews. Now we’re back to BBM-as-savior.

[ The InfoWorld reviews: BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10. | Mobile security: iOS vs. Android vs. Windows Phone vs. BlackBerry. | For quick, smart takes on the news you’ll be talking about, check out InfoWorld TechBrief — subscribe today. ]

Unfortunately, BBM won’t save BlackBerry either. Lots of cross-platform IM apps are out there, and BBM simply doesn’t stand out. In fact, due to its poor setup, it stands back.

My colleague Serdar Yegulalp and I both tried BBM this week, after BlackBerry granted us early access. Although the BBM app is available for free download for Android and iOS devices, BlackBerry is rationing access to the service, presumably to ramp up the network to handle demand.

Unfortunately, it’s not working. Yegulalp and I both waited for hours for our apps to register themselves once we signed in via our BlackBerry ID credentials. Our invites to each other to initiate chatting — you must first provide your PIN to the person you want to chat with — sat for half a day in the bowels of BlackBerry’s servers before they were finally delivered to us. And the service went dead for us mere hours after we got to use it, though it came back up later.

No wonder BlackBerry was rationing access — and it still didn’t work!

Even if you chalk it up to poor capacity planning or a panicked release, the BBM app itself is awkward to set up, doesn’t connect well to your contacts, and at the end of the day offers the same basic IM functionality as everyone else — maybe even less at this rate.

The PIN requirement is awkward for several reasons. First, who’s going to remember a random string of characters? Maybe BlackBerry does that to avoid name collisions, but it’s still problematic. As a result, you can’t easily tell people how to initiate a chat. The app can send emails to people with that PIN; they then click a link that opens a browser to a BlackBerry service and sends an invite to the BBM app to connect the two users. That’s an inelegant and roundabout method.

Even more roundabout is how BBM deals with Exchange contacts — in short, it doesn’t. If you want to use BBM with work colleagues, you have to manually enter their email addresses to send invites. That’s inelegant, too. (At least BBM can look up your personal contacts on your phone.) And worse, during the initial setup, when you’re asked to specify whom you want to chat with, you can’t even enter email addresses manually. You have to skip that step and add them later.

This is the same lack of concern for user experience that has long marked IT systems in general and the BlackBerry in particular. Until the iPhone debuted in 2007, that’s the way it was. But in 2013, it’s no longer acceptable. It’s also why BlackBerry is fighting for its very life.

The pervasive BlackBerry-ness of BBM is also apparent in a really dumb limitation: Only one device can use a BBM account at a time. Most mobile users have several devices — a smartphone, a tablet, and a computer — and they can have any or all of those with them. It’s common to see people move among their devices even in one sitting. That’s why most chat services let your account be active from multiple devices at the same time.

AOL Instant Messenger, for examples, has long done this, as does Apple’s iMessage. But not BBM. If you connect on your iPad, for example, you’re disconnected from your Galaxy S 4. Security feature or idiotic oversight? Who can say? And there’s no way — none at all — to chat on your PC or Mac. We sometimes had trouble switching the service from one device to another, getting server error messages for hours — nearly a full day, in one case. Apparently, the new device couldn’t get registered by BlackBerry’s servers, so the app displayed the unhelpful error message until the connection happened minutes or hours later.

Here and there, you’ll find a few features worth noting, like the ability to copy the entire text of a chat at once instead of message by message. That’s especially handy in a smartphone or tablet environment. But those few pluses are not enough to redeem BBM.

Who would use a service like this? The only probable answer is the existing BlackBerry faithful, those who have an existing circle of contacts with BBM, or are otherwise so married to BlackBerry as a company — or, rather, a concept — that they can’t imagine ditching it for anything else. They’d better try, though; unless you’re already on this platform, you won’t want to bother with it.

If the general public wouldn’t really want BBM in the first place, how is it going to pull BlackBerry out of its freefall? A vanilla messaging service that is awkward to use, limited in where it can be used, and of dubious reliability will be another nail in BlackBerry’s coffin. But unlike the BlackBerry 10 failure, the BBM fiasco is squarely of BlackBerry’s own making.

This article, “BBM: The Messenger is already dead,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.