I've been in love with BlackBerry Messenger for years. The past month (April 2017) has not been kind. BBM has become...flaky. Unreliable.
So I tried something else: Telegram (and it's cool sibling, Plus Messenger).
But I missed those beloved BBM emoticons. And I loathed whatever emojis come with stock Telegram/Plus.
So, again, I dug in and solved my own problems. Here you will find links to modified versions of Telegram and Plus Messenger. The main emoji page has been modified to incorporate BBM emoticons, and they should map fairly closely to the emotions you want to express (because I can't push an emoji set out to all devices, so folks using stock will get the gist of what you're saying through their ugly stock emojis).
PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE FOLLOWING:
If you are currently running "stock" Telegram or Plus Messenger, YOU HAVE TO UNINSTALL THE APP BEFORE INSTALLING THIS ONE.
Yes, you will lose all your contact- and group-specific settings. YOU WILL LOSE ALL OF YOUR SETTINGS. YOU WILL HAVE TO SET EVERYTHING UP AGAIN.
But let's be realistic, that's a snap.
Future updates should not have the same issues, so long as you're actually performing an upgrade to the app.
Once you've uninstalled the stock app with its ugly emojis, you can install the shiny new version I've linked here, and enjoy better emoticons.
20190209 UPDATE:
OK, this project has been humming along in the background for a long time now. And suddenly a flurry of new people got interested in it. (Sadly, BBM is faltering and is far from the security stalwart it once was *cough*outsourcing*cough*).
Anyway, I have done a pretty thorough remapping of the BBM emoticons into Telegram and Plus. I can do the same for pretty much any other Telegram client, but I'd rather focus on those two for now.
I have done away with the previous TeleBB10 version, which was built specifically for lower Android runtimes so it would work on BB10 devices. Instead, I'm using universal variants of both apks, so TeleBBM will run just fine on BB10 devices now. If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's OK. It just means you're late to the party.
I have also started tracking the same version numbers used by the stock client apps. It didn't make sense to maintain my own version numbering. For a while I thought about developing my own client app, which is why I started in that direction. But that quickly became unwieldy, so I just use the same version numbers now.
If you're already using Telegram, there are links below to my TeleBBM channel (where the app is distributed) and to my TeleBBM Chat (guess what that's for).
If you're not on Telegram yet, I have links to the apks on G Drive as well.
-wu
TeleBBM 5.3.1
PlusBBM 5.2.1.3
TeleBBM Telegram Channel
TeleBBM Telegram Chat
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