YouMail ditches BlackBerry support, a sign of the times

Visual voicemail app YouMail announced on its blog plans to drop support for BlackBerry and thereby end development for the platform at least until it starts showing signs of life again, but let’s be honest, the chances of that happening are slim.

It’s a sad day for the folks at YouMail. The BlackBerry is what made the app such a success. It reached its first one million users on BlackBerry and greatly increased brand awareness for the company. The suspension of development for BlackBerry is due to the rapid decline in BlackBerry owners. The YouMail team has come to the conclusion that it’s no longer worth the time and effort to support such a small user base. They even joke that the app has more Windows Phone users than BlackBerry users and there isn’t even an official YouMail app available for Windows Phone.

In a blog post, CEO Alex Quilici writes:

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.

Along with the news, YouMail announced a final update for BlackBerry released a few days ago. It includes new features for “ditching” callers so they can’t get in contact with you, an ad-free experience with the initial $0 price still in tact, and a revamp with UI and speed improvements. Though many loyal BlackBerry users have expressed disappointment in YouMail for leaving them behind, at least they are left in good hands with this update.

YouMail is available with continued support in the iPhone App Store and Google Play.

[via YouMail]