BlackBerry partners with 12 Android OEMs to preinstall BBM

BlackBerry may be down in the dumps, but their messaging app BBM is hitting all sorts of records on Android and iOS, surpassing almost all early analyst predictions for the application after getting over twenty million downloads in a week on both platforms.

The Canadian smartphone maker has already grabbed twelve OEM partners who will preinstall BBM onto their devices. This is a big push by BlackBerry to make BBM the most well known messaging service on both BlackBerry and Android, as well as iOS.

Unsurprisingly, BlackBerry has failed to grab any of the big names in the Android ecosystem – considering they are almost all making their own messaging applications, we doubt partnering up with BBM would be the best way to progress their own first party apps.

The current list of OEM partners includes Be, Brightstar, Celkon, EVERCOSS, IMO, Micromax, Mito, Snexian, Spice, TECNO, TiPhone, and Zen. These may not be known in the US, but some are well known in Latin America, Asia and Africa and may grab a more installed userbase with BBM pre-installed on their devices.

Samsung did partner up with BlackBerry in Africa to offer BBM first on Android, a clever move by Samsung, considering BlackBerry huge installed userbase in Africa who already use and love BBM. It is a move to bring Samsung products into the regions where they currently have little control.

Android is currently not the place where BBM thrives the most, iOS users are having the most fun out of the application, with more users picking up and using the free app on their iPhone and iPad. This is surprising, considering the huge iMessage userbase and big competitors like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

BlackBerry may not be a company valued over $5 billion, but their app BBM could take them to a whole new level of wealth if they are able to manage the app and make sure the userbase sticks on and keeps using and utilising some of the features to make BlackBerry money.