BlackBerry finally gave in and brought its famous BBM messaging service to Android and iOS last year, but it wanted to remind us that it still had a smartphone platform of its own by giving its apps a nasty BlackBerry 10 style user interface. Upcoming BBM updates will change that, however, with a new makeover that brings a more native user experience.
Your Samsung Gear 2 tells you when you get incoming messages and lets you read them on your wrist — and thanks to Fleksy, you can now reply to them without pulling out your smartphone. The company has integrated its award-winning virtual keyboard into a new messaging app designed specifically for the smartwatch.
In an effort to keep up with Google Hangouts on Android, Samsung has baked SMS and MMS integration into the latest version of its ChatON messaging app. The service will now roll your instant messages and traditional text messages into one conversation, so you only need to keep up with one thread.
Twitter hopes to compete with instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Line with a new app that’s dedicated to direct messaging, AllThingsD reports. The company hopes the move will bring “the long-buried feature to the forefront” and place a new emphasis on its private messaging capabilities.
BBM’s cross-platform launch failed miserably this weekend. The app made its way to the iPhone in a small few countries, but the rollout was halted before it could reach the United States — or Google Play.
BlackBerry’s excuse for the catastrophic failure was that a leaked BBM APK for Android was causing some server troubles, and now the Canadian company has told fans that it will “take some time” to fix the problem, and that we should not expect to see the app this week.
