[avidberry]

I also just updated my BBM but can't see the difference. BB only listed bug fixes, performance improvements and wider support of Android devices in the change log.

[glrobita]

I have a friend with an experia and his phone won't switch to landscape mode. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Posted via CB10

[bbhuh]

Bugs

Many times bbm is not running on my friends phone running ics 4.0.4. No icon at the status bar while they never turned the option off. They had to start it manually (few times) with some error/not responding warning.

This has never happened to facebook, line, or wechat application and still receive notif/new messages on these chat platform.

Hope blackberry fix this soon.

[Brandon Tobias]

can you request HQ picture when you receive an image, like BB10? That way you can get original or better version of the picture.

yes tap and hold the image then the menu opens with options to save, request high quality(orginal image size) and share like to fb and stuff

[ryanza]

I've just loaded BBM onto my Tab 2 GT-P6200. It is running 4.1.2.

When BBM first opened for Android it was "not available for this device" but now I'm waiting for the confirmation email to let me start using BBM on the 7 inch Tab 2.

The BBM guys must be drinking a lot of coffee all of a sudden, the updates, fixes and improvements are arriving almost as fast as leaked BB10 OS's!

Posted via CB10

[alpha beta gaga]

defnately needs a customisable font size. far too tiny at moment. bak to whatsapp for now

[stevesavalas]

I don't see why the constant notification can't just be transparent... I.e when you 'disable' it, it just turns transparent so you can't see it (although it's obviously still there). Problem solved, no?

[karasi79]

I had to force close my bbm app trying to get the pics to load for contacts and doing so lost a lot of people that had added me. So more bugs that need to be fixed!

[DenverRalphy]

I don't see why the constant notification can't just be transparent... I.e when you 'disable' it, it just turns transparent so you can't see it (although it's obviously still there). Problem solved, no?

Google's policies state that any 3rd party app that is "always on" must have a visible icon in the notification/status bar. It's a measure to ensure users are aware that an app is actively working at all times and will be constantly consuming battery and/or data. Making it transparent would render it invisible, and thus breaking the policy. Besides, it's really not the issue of seeing a constant icon (whoopdy doo, who cares), but it's the point that it represents that the app is "always on" that has users a bit bent over it.

[Sayantabonny]

When will the update release??

[alpha beta gaga]

Google's policies state that any 3rd party app that is "always on" must have a visible icon in the notification/status bar.

interesting. is whatsapp an 'always on' app?

[myeightiron]

Having problems, delivering message to those on ios and android. After upgrade 10.2


Posted via CB10

[DenverRalphy]

interesting. is whatsapp an 'always on' app?

Nope. It wakes when the device receives a push notification via the GCM.


SwiftKeyed/Flowed via Tapatalk 4 Beta

[stunna2010]

Its killing my battery life on my S3 too

[Mac of York]

I'm having issues with messages just staying as Check instead of D. Then when the person responds or whatever, it sends them through. Makes trying to have a conversation very difficult.

[stevesavalas]

Google's policies state that any 3rd party app that is "always on" must have a visible icon in the notification/status bar. It's a measure to ensure users are aware that an app is actively working at all times and will be constantly consuming battery and/or data. Making it transparent would render it invisible, and thus breaking the policy. Besides, it's really not the issue of seeing a constant icon (whoopdy doo, who cares), but it's the point that it represents that the app is "always on" that has users a bit bent over it.

Well to be honest, that's what I thought. But I have apps that allow you to hide the ongoing notification. Can I say which one(s)..? ok, well one is 'widgetsoid' which allows you to have widgets in your pull-down notification shade. It's obviously an ongoing notification but you have the option to hide it - you know it's still there, albeit transparent, because any subsequent notifications you receive are further over the notification bar because the transparent icon occupies the left-most position. I guess BBM could allow you to choose the colour of the icon - that way you can match it to your notification bar colour. All a bit pointless, granted. But I think people are more bothered about the presence of the icon, not the fact that BBM is running. By the way , doesn't Whatsapp run all the time ? It's always present in the 'running apps' list...

[AwJm]

You can hide the BBM icon

[Deanig_12]

Okay, basically I created this thread to share known bugs and also list suggested improvements for BBM. Feel free to chime in as I will update the list based on the replies.

Known bugs:
1. Music status update doesn't work properly
2. Settings for "Show My Country and Time", and "Save Chat History" doesn't stick (it keeps turning itself off once you close BBM and re-open it)
3. No option to turn off "Updates" nor ability to limit/clear the recent ones
4. Inability to categorize contacts and change font/emoticon size
5. Clicking on a new message in the notification shade takes us to the last open message we were in, not the new one
6. Notifications for the same message going off more than once until we open it
7. Swipe from the right does not open the menu. Instead, we have to click the three dots or use our android menu key
8. Ping doesn't work (no vibrate) when we're pinging someone who currently is in the middle of conversation with us (their open chat windows are us.) Strangely, once they leave/close that chat windows, Ping works fine.
9. In order to put emoticons in our status, we need to turn on Action Bar (which is huge thus quite disturbing during chat)
10. In Group Chats, a lot of times, the messages appear out of order and are grouped under individual users rather than in the order they arrived.

Improvements needed:
1. RAM usage: at this moment, BBM consumed 86 MB with 1 group and 3 active chats. It's a bit too excessive for me. Update: after a while, I noticed the memory used dropped to around 45-50MB. On the other hand, when trying to invite several friends, I noticed RAM usage fluctuated to a whopping 156 MB!

2. Low res pictures sent: yes we can tap and hold the pictures to request higher quality ones, but 15KB is a bit too small for me. It's a good idea to do that in legacy devices, not in Android phones (most of which come with higher than 4 inch screen). Anyway, some will find it a problem while some will not.

3. Persistent notification icon in system tray, see detail in BBM has an annoying persistent notification — but you might not want to turn it off | Android Central (PS. Mods, sorry for the link to other forum, but at least it's Mobile Nation site). I myself turn it off and found no problems whatsoever.

4. BBM Voice!!! Perhaps it will take some time to bring BBM Video to cross-platform BBM, but hopefully BBM Voice will be included in the near future's update. Update: nvm, it looks like BB has no plan to bring BBM Voice to Android version (perhaps so BB10 has higher appeals to the masses??)

5. Auto Text/Word Substitution is not present in this version of BBM. It's unclear whether we will receive it in the future or not since, as I recall in BBOS, auto text is embedded system-wise and not specific to BBM (ie. also present in email)

6. Option to turn-off BBM Group notification like one in 10.2 (current option is only to turn-off all notifications)

Option 4 your wrong there fetching bbm voice and video cross platform when there ready!


Posted via CB10

[Yatezy]

I was wondering what was going on.

This will probably be because of the apps RAM usage. The OS will be shutting it down and then allowing it to reopen.

Regards to the constant notification icon what it needs is one similar to Google Now and Oovoo (the only two apps i khave installed of that have this feature) where there is a notification when the notification bar is pulled down but there isnt one in the status bar.

[bbhuh]

This will probably be because of the apps RAM usage. The OS will be shutting it down and then allowing it to reopen.

Regards to the constant notification icon what it needs is one similar to Google Now and Oovoo (the only two apps i khave installed of that have this feature) where there is a notification when the notification bar is pulled down but there isnt one in the status bar.

I'm not a programmer but I see facebook and whatsapp using google cloud messaging (GCM) on their app. I don't know what that means but I see these two app always send me notification without having to constantly appear on the status bar like BBM.

Why can't bbm use GCM like facebook and whatsapp?

[stevesavalas]

You can hide the BBM icon

No, you're missing the point - read the posts earlier in the discussion.... :-)

[Yatezy]

I'm not a programmer but I see facebook and whatsapp using google cloud messaging (GCM) on their app. I don't know what that means but I see these two app always send me notification without having to constantly appear on the status bar like BBM.

Why can't bbm use GCM like facebook and whatsapp?

I read this somewhere else, can't remember tho, but if it used GCM the notifications would go through Google servers thus losing one of the reasons that makes bbm so popular, it's security.

[iN8ter]

Well to be honest, that's what I thought. But I have apps that allow you to hide the ongoing notification. Can I say which one(s)..? ok, well one is 'widgetsoid' which allows you to have widgets in your pull-down notification shade. It's obviously an ongoing notification but you have the option to hide it - you know it's still there, albeit transparent, because any subsequent notifications you receive are further over the notification bar because the transparent icon occupies the left-most position. I guess BBM could allow you to choose the colour of the icon - that way you can match it to your notification bar colour. All a bit pointless, granted. But I think people are more bothered about the presence of the icon, not the fact that BBM is running. By the way , doesn't Whatsapp run all the time ? It's always present in the 'running apps' list...

Android 4.3 forces the notification/icon even if the app tries to hide it.

And most users do not root their phones, so it doesn't matter what you have an app for.

[iN8ter]

I read this somewhere else, can't remember tho, but if it used GCM the notifications would go through Google servers thus losing one of the reasons that makes bbm so popular, it's security.

Completely misunderstanding how PUSH Notifications even work.

You're new here. Read up on some threads and you'll eventually get it.

P.S. A PUSH Notifications only has to tell the app that there is new data. That data does not have to be in the PUSH Notification. The user doesn't even have to see the PUSH notification. The actual notification that the user sees comes from the app, not the GCM service. This is the flow for this:

Friend sends you a message...
BB Servers dispatch a notification to a GCM Service.
GCM Service dispatches a notification to the BBM app on your phone.
"There's new Data, Please Fetch it"
BBM App wakes up because the phone rang, sees the alert, and downloads the Messages.
BBM then tells you (via a Notification on the phone) "New Message from Friend."

Google does not have to see the message contents, and it doesn't even really have to see who the message is from. All it has to do is tell the BBM app that it has to "download new data." Private information need not be exchanged over GCM, just like it need not be exchanged over APNS or MPNS on iOS or Windows Phone.

I doubt BBRY is using this type of service on iOS, and they certainly won't be using this type of service if they ever go to Windows Phone because there's no way Microsoft will let them destroy batteries with this hoopla.

Platforms have built up PUSH infrastructures for a reason. Given how paranoid RIM used to be about battery life on their devices (and how they wanted everything to go through BIS on legacy devices), it seems almost ridiculous that they'd go this route on Android, when the infrastructure to dispatch PUSH Notifications without killing batteries has been in place for quite a while (C2DM and now GCM).

Even then, there are much more efficient ways to do this. Samsung isn't the benchmark for good software development by any means, but at least they had a clue and didn't code their apps so that the whole thing was constantly loaded and running in the background just to get reliable message delivery, among other things...

[Yatezy]

That explains it a bit better. I'm only going off what I've read (possibly on here) as I would've thought something like GCM would've been fine.

I'd much prefer it that way tbh unless they can hide the notification from the status bar. Then it won't matter, to me personally.