BlackBerry will bring BBM to Apple, Android; introduces cheaper Q5 phone

BlackBerry, with an eye on making a bigger footprint in the mobile space, announced that its popular messaging system, BlackBerry Messenger, will soon be available on competitors’ platforms.

BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM, will be coming to phones that support Apple’s iOS 6 platform and Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich. BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins said that the BBM apps for those platforms will come this summer and will be available for free.

Heins focused on how quickly the company’s application store has grown since it introduced its new phones earlier this year; the store now offers more than 120,000 apps, he said. After critics complained that a dearth of apps had been hurting BlackBerry’s phone sales, the company has pushed to get top developers in the store. The 120,000 number still falls far behind Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play app marketplace, which both boast around 500,000 apps. Yet while some notable apps, such as Instagram, are still not compatible with the BlackBerry platform, the company has been making some headway in attracting major app players. Heins announced that Skype will be now be available for the company’s all-touch smartphone, the Z10.