BBM pushed back at least a week due to rogue app

After pulling BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) off the App Store and Google Play marketplaces, BlackBerry has stalled the release of its messaging app for at least another week.

Posting to the company's blog overnight, BBM executive vice-president Andrew Bocking said that he does not anticipate the app launching this week, after a false start and issues with an unreleased version of the app.

Although the company promised to launch BBM over the weekend of September 21 and 22, it has been forced to stop its rollout due to the issues created by the unreleased version. According to Bocking, this unreleased version creates "volumes of data traffic orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user", and negatively impacts its systems.

Bocking said that it is available for download from other file sharing sites, and presumably side-loaded, but he also said that the number of active users of the unreleased app is close to 1 million and was accelerating at the time.

The official version of the app resolves these issues, but its release would also mean that it could not block the unreleased version. It indicates that BlackBerry may be in the midst of changing its back-end systems so that any requests from the unreleased version are denied access, while the official version, which it can still control prior to launch, can be pointed toward its servers.

In any case, Bocking said it is not a simple task, and suggested that it would take the remainder of the week.

BlackBerry's BBM site now indicates that the app is "coming to Android and iPhone", but again has no release date. Instead, potential users are able to leave their email address so that they are notified at its second launch.