BlackBerry Messenger is Shutting Down over lack of users

BlackBerry Messenger, one of the early players of mobile chatting, is shutting down after a tremendous decline in its user base. BlackBerry Messenger, popularly called as BBM, was once at its A game and since its launch in 2005, it had a good run. However, over the years, it lost its charm when iPhones and Android arrived.

For a long time, BBM was everyone’s favorite and during its prime time, it played a major role in the 2011 London riots because of the encrypted nature of the messages.As WhatsApp and other messengers started to become popular, the company started losing users. The world gradually moved away from BlackBerry and it no longer was able to cope up with the competition.

Emtek, an Indonesian company that acquired licensing rights for the BBM service announced shutting down of their BBM consumer version a month ago, which gave users time to switch. “The technology industry is very fluid, and in spite of our considerable efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on,”Emtek wrote in a blog post.

BBM users were logged out of the app yesterday and were left with a goodbye message and the news about its alternative offering called BBM Enterprise, an end-to-end messaging platform for business users.

Before it is gone forever, people who still use BBM can download their files, photos, and videos.The death of BBM is sad news for its fan, as it sounds like an end of something so endearing.