Less than eight hours after officially hitting Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store, the BlackBerry Messenger app (free download) has seen more than five million active downloads on iOS and Android combined, BlackBerry announced in a tweet.
The messaging application is a staggered rollout which employs a reservation system to prevent the kind of a server strain seen after the Android build had leaked out prematurely. According to some repots, there’s a workaround that could let you use the app without waiting…
Here’s BlackBerry’s tweet.
Next 5 million in line – your turn! Open up BBM and click “I got the email” to get started on #BBM right away!
— BBM (@BBM) October 22, 2013
For the sake of completeness, the five million metric excludes downloads as the figure applies to those that have downloaded and activated the app on their devices.
For more on BBM, check out Yahoo’s nice hands-on article.
BBMÂ lets you chat with friends on iPhone and other smartphones that run the app and comes with a host of features such as multi-party chat and sharing, always-on connectivity, profile editing, emoticons, typing and availability indicators, animated GIFs in profile images, status updates and more.
CNET yesterday posted a nice workaround which lets you bypass the wait list and sign up for BBM immediately, in three easy steps.
Here’s how:
1. Fire up the app and enter your e-mail address
2. Tap Next and then force-close BBM (double-click the Home button and swipe the app away)
3. Relaunch the app and you should be able to get past the wait list
At this point, you’ll either have to provide your existing BBM credentials (provided you signed up at BBM.com beforehand) or create a brand new account.
I’ve had a mixed success with the trick.
It worked without a hiccup on my iPhone 5s, but my older iPhone which uses a different cell phone number was refusing to go past the reservation prompt although I was using a different email address to sign up for BBM.
I tried deleting and re-downloading the software, to no avail.
BlackBerry has the power to fix the workaround at any time on their end and it seems they’ve done just that, at least for some users.
Of course, your mileage may (and will) vary so I invite you to share your experience with fellow readers down in the comments.