BBM for Android & iOS downloaded over 10 million times in 24 hours

BlackBerry has announced that its BBM for Android and iOS apps have been downloaded over 10 million times in the first 24 hours of release. The company has not revealed individual numbers for Android but the Google Play count puts the total installs somewhere in one to five million bracket.

While the number of installs looks pretty big, the actual number of users with access to BBM is still low as many are waiting for their turn in the queue to complete the account registration.

In related news, the company has stated that it will soon be bringing BBM Video, BBM Voice and BBM Channels to Android and iOS versions but it did not give a specific timeline.

Bogus BBM Google Play user reviews

In its announcement of 10 million installs milestone, BlackBerry also noted that BBM has received very positive reviews on both Google Play and Apple App Store. It even highlighted that there were over 60,000 five star reviews out of the total around 87,000 (the number has gone up to 74,000 five star reviews out of total 108,000 at the time of writing this report).

Looks great right? Not really, turns out a fraction of these reviews (the exact extent is unclear) seem to be bogus in nature. First spotted by Android Police, there is a pattern among these user reviews and all of them seem to be variations of the following statement.

Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth.

While there is no way to say for sure that this is BlackBerry’s doing, it certainly looks like that.

Update: BlackBerry has acknowledged that something shady is going on with BBM user-reviews on Google Play and stated that it is working with Google to resolve the same. It gave the following statement to Android Central earlier today. 

We have recently been made aware of a number of potentially fake five-star reviews of BBM for Android on Google Play. We do not approve of or condone such activities and are committed to working with Google to resolve this. There are also many genuinely great and useful reviews from our new BBM users on Google Play. We would like to encourage our passionate fans and users to continue to provide true assessments of the BBM experience through the proper channels.