BlackBerry may launch BBM for Android, iOS in India this week

The fact that BlackBerry’s popular BlackBerry Messenger service is coming to Android and iOS has been known for a while now. And now, it looks like it could be launched in India this week. T his report on CrackBerry quotes Samsung Nigeria as saying that the service would be available in that country from Friday. CrackBerry also adds there is a Blackberry India event this week, which is on the same day as a BlackBerry event in Malaysia, that would seem to strongly suggest the new cross platform BBM service will be available this week. [caption id=“attachment_1113955” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A screenshot of the BBM app page on the Google Play store[/caption] BlackBerry Messenger in its new avatar will be competing with popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber and the recently popular WeChat. And of course, there is the new Google Hangouts app which replaced Google talk. BBM is seen as being more secure than other more popular messaging apps, and its release for other platforms has been eagerly awaited. In fact, soon after BlackBerry first announced that the messenger service would be available for Android and iOS, a fake app fooled more than 100,000 Android users into downloading it before Google pulled it off the play store. Now however, it looks like we are finally about to see the real thing. This report on Android Community said that the page for the app had already been leaked on the Google Play store, but noted that it wasn’t working for everyone yet: “The app that leaked this weekend and is available as we speak still doesn’t work. You can install it, sign in, and even make a new account to use the app but it still won’t work. It’s currently being tested internally and only will work for premium whitelisted accounts.” The page has since been taken down. For more information on what we can expect to see from BlackBerry Messenger and how it will compare to other messaging apps, click here .