BBM for Android passes 100 million downloads

BBM is now showing in the 100 million-500 million installs category. BlackBerry also notes that this is just a part of their total, given their availability on iOS, Windows Phone, and of course, BlackBerry.

BlackBerry had this to say on their milestone:

BBM for Android has officially achieved a milestone on the Google Play Store: 100 million installs. That puts BBM in the top tier of messaging apps on Google Play, and we got there in a little over a year as we first posted BBM for Android in late October 2013. We have 3.7 million reviews, and just shy of 2.4 million of them are five stars.

BBM recently added some major new features. These include Custom PINs, which allow you to create your own BBM PIN for a small monthly fee. Also added was support for Android Wear, letting you view notifications and even reply to messages, all from your wrist.

If you're not one of the 100 million, you can download BBM for Android from the Google Play Store now.

Source: BlackBerry

BBM on Android Wear is almost exactly what you'd expect

Today at CES 2015, BlackBerry announced that Android Wear support will soon be coming to BBM, and we went wrist-on to check out how it works. And, well, it works almost exactly like you'd expect. You get all the appropriate notifications on your connected Android Wear smartwatch (in this case it was demoed on a Moto 360), and the ability to reply.

BBM takes advantage of a lot of what's built in to the Android Wear SDK. When you get a new contact request, BBM doesn't show you the contact's photo (for security purposes). But once you're connected, that photo appears for any notifications you receive. When you get a message, swiping to the left gives you the option to reply, which you can do with canned replies or via Android Wear's really quite good voice dictation. It's easy and straight-forward, just as we would want BBM on Android Wear to be.