Four years ago, a former employee of BlackBerry who is now the founder of Kik messaging app, Ted Livingston, told executives in BlackBerry to make BBM available to both Android and iPhone so that it can curb the strength Whatsapp is having on these devices but this advice went on deaf hears.
According to Ted, who worked for BlackBerry as an engineer while a mechatronics student at University of Waterloo persuaded BlackBerry executives to expand BBM to other platforms with the rise of Android and iOS and they absolutely refused.
He says he understands their point of view as people buy BlackBerry because of its BBM and releasing BBM to other platforms poses a serious risk.
Ted Livingston later left BlackBerry due to their hardheadedness to create his own app known as Kik that was cross platform and became extremely popular. Kik has about 90 million users to date while BlackBerry has only 60 million users. This popularity made BlackBerry to sue Ted for patent infringement but was settled finally.
According to Ted, "BBM was the killer app and chat apps are still the killer apps of consumer smartphones, if RIM had spun BBM out of the company and let an independent company run with (as a cross platform service) it would be big enough to rival Facebook"
Of course, this gentle advice that BlackBerry disregarded is now been put into action and soon, BBm will go cross-platform
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