In the past, many service providers allowed sign-in to BBM using a dedicated BlackBerry data plan.

In addition to offering text-based instant messages, BBM also allowed users to send pictures, voicenotes (audio recordings), files (up to 16 MB), share real time location on a map, stickers and a wide selection of emojis.

Communication was possible only among BlackBerry devices, until late 2013 when BBM was released on iOS and Android systems followed by Windows Phone.

There were more than 190 million BBM users worldwide as of 2015,[3] and BlackBerry infrastructure handled 30 petabytes of data traffic each month by early 2013.

This update is focused on social communication mediums, including 'BBM Connected Apps', which allow the user to invite friends to share their favourite BlackBerry Applications.

BlackBerry Limited would provide the BBM API to Emtek as part of the six-year, $207 million deal.

[22][23] However, on October 10, 2011, users of the service in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa were widely affected by an outage at provider RIM's UK headquarters in Slough, England.

The outage lasted for two days, during which BlackBerry Messenger was reported to be unavailable, thus seriously affecting the company's reputation.

On November 4, 2014, BBM scored 1 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Secure Messaging Scorecard".

It lost points because communications are not encrypted with a key the provider doesn't have access to (i.e. communications are not end-to-end encrypted), users can't verify contacts' identities, past messages are not secure if the encryption keys are stolen (i.e. the app does not provide forward secrecy), the code is not open to independent review (i.e. the code is not open-source), the security design is not properly documented, and there has not been a recent independent code audit.

It later scored 5 out of 7 points after additional information was provided by BlackBerry and reflected in the EFF changelog dated November 14, 2014.

It lost points because past messages are not secure if the encryption keys are stolen and the code is not open to independent review.