We’ve just updated our BlackBerry app with some major improvements:

  • We’ve added the ability to ditch callers – where ditched callers hear  a “number out of service” message and can’t leave a voicemail.   It’s now very easy to get rid of telemarketers or ex’s.
  • We’ve completely rebuilt the app, so that it’s much more stable and the UI is much faster.  We’d had a long list of known problems with how it was implemented and we’ve spent the past 3 months or so really cleaning things up.
  • Finally, we’ve removed ads from the app.   So now not only is the app free, but it’s ad-free as well.

There’s also a ton of other bug fixes and more minor feature additions, and we’ve really focused on making contact uploading and updating work smoothly.

But it’s a bittersweet release for us.    That’s because we are suspending doing any further work on our BlackBerry app, at least for now.

This was a tough decision, especially since the BlackBerry is what got us our first million registered users and put us on the map as a company.    But over the past year we’ve seen our BlackBerry audience steadily shrink, with a steady exodus of those users moving to the iPhone and to Android (where fortunately, they’re tending to keep YouMail as their voicemail service).     And we’ve also seen the number of BlackBerry users/day plummet while Android and iPhone users have soared – which is easy to see from this chart of our BlackBerry registrations/day since 1/1/2011.

It’s sad, but on many days we’re now getting fewer BB users than Windows Phone 7 users, and we don’t even have a Windows Phone 7 app!

So enjoy this release.    If BlackBerry stages a comeback (and we’re definitely rooting for BB10 to take off!) or we can figure out how to drive a meaningful number of new BlackBerry users, we’ll be back.

But for now, this is the last hurrah.