BBM on iOS 6: critical notification settings

I've seen a lot of posts over the last few months about people using iPhones and iPads that aren't seeing BBM notifications if the app is not open.

While not ALL of the following will solve that - as BBM still seems to have some message delivery issues at times - they are critical to get basic functionality in the app and honestly I don't know why BlackBerry does not either automatically make these settings changes when the app is installed or at the very least popup a banner suggesting that users do so.

This pertains only to iOS 6 since I don't have access to an iOS 7 device at this time to test.

1. Go to Settings/Notification Center/BBM and select the "alerts" style.
2. Go to Settings/General/Background App Refresh, set BBM to "On".
3. Go to BBM app/Settings and enable "Badge App Icon" and optionally "Sounds".
4. CRITICAL: Restart the device - this may be required for the settings to take effect.

Re: #1: This will show a popup message when a new BBM message is received. If you just want a momentary "banner", you can set that instead. Whatever you do, do not set "None", or else you will not see any notifications when you are not in the app!

Re: #2: This allows the app to receive messages while in the background. This way, the sender should see a "D" indicator indicating message delivery, after the alert or banner appears on the device with the new message. The sender will receive an "R" indicator when the message is read inside of BBM.

Re: #3: This will show an indicator on top of the BBM icon indicating how many messages have been received since the app was last opened. "Sounds" will activate audible notifications.

Re: #4: I found on my friend's iPhone 4S that a restart was necessary before the settings above took effect.

This was tested using the 2.x version of BBM.

I will update this post as necessary to make it as accurate and current as possible. Please feel free to update me with your input in the comments.

Here's a good post someone made which shows a screenshot of BlackBerry's guidance on some of these settings:

Originally Posted by dusdal

KB35264-Notifications and sounds for BBM for iPhone


Attachment 237078

Awesome thanks for the information

Posted via Z30 on CB10

Does this fix the iPhone nor being able to see the messages that are written to them? I message my wife from my Z30 often and she has an iPhone 5. She usually messages me back saying I know you sent me a message but I cannot see what you wrote.

That is very annoying for her and me because I have to resort to using the message which I hate!



Posted via Z30 on CB10

Originally Posted by Tony2255

Does this fix the iPhone nor being able to see the messages that are written to them? I message my wife from my Z30 often and she has an iPhone 5. She usually messages me back saying I know you sent me a message but I cannot see what you wrote.

That is very annoying for her and me because I have to resort to using the message which I hate!

Well there still seem to be non-delivery problems. I experienced this while doing the testing that led to this post.

I don't know where the fault is there, but I can only speculate that non-BlackBerry traffic is de-prioritized in the BBM network and gets dropped sometimes when traffic is high.

For example, on the day I was testing this, I sent several comments. One never got to the iPhone. Then after I saw that was not delivered, a few minutes later, I sent another. That one was received, the previous one apparently was never received. (I should check to see if it did eventually get received, I will try to followup on this)

Here's something else that might affect whether recipients on Android or iOS get a notification tone or not:

KB35793 - No notification tone for a new BBM message if the chat for the message is in the foreground (BlackBerry KnowledgeBase)