Recently blackberry launched it’s popular messaging app, bbm, for ios and android. There’s no doubt that it’s off to a good start with over 5 million downloads in the first few days. Yet many people are wondering why blackberry, a waning technology company, would make a move to make what is widely regarded as the best feature of its bb10 devices available to Ios and Android.

Messaging is a unique feature, different from other software features because exclusivity is not a selling point. In fact a messaging application is only as good as the number of users it has. Whatsapp is not as abundant in features as other messaging platforms on the market but it has 400 million users worldwide. Perhaps then, blackberrys move is not focussing on trying to differentiate its product, but rather an effort to try to keep it’s remaining customers.

When it was released bbm was faster, more abundant in features and functional than competitors. But at some point, mobile messaging took off while BBM was left behind in its Blackberry world.  BlackBerry was caught idling by the iPhone, and the same thing happened to BBM with the latest generation of messaging apps. BBM’s move to cross-platform is as necessary as it is late.