BlackBerry 10 getting Whatsapp app by next week: Report

Whatsapp is all set to make its debut on BlackBerry 10 smartphones and the rumours doing the rounds is that it may hit the BlackBerry World as early as next week. This prediction has been made on the micro-blogging website Twitter by Alex Kinsella, who works with BlackBerry developer relations team. The tweet has now been deleted.

As per earlier reports too it was expected that BlackBerry will be getting a native app for Whatsapp by March.

Whatsapp is a popular messaging app. It is also an alternative to BlackBerry's most popular BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) App. BBM as an app can only work between BlackBerry devices irrespective of which version of operating system they are running on. Prior to BlackBerry 10 launch, the consumers had to subscribe to a BlackBerry plan from their respective operators to use BBM. In the new operating system, BBM will work on Wi-Fi as well.

Recently Whatsapp had also announced that this app will now also work with its dual-SIM Asha phones. This app has a record of exchanging 10 billion total messages in a single day in August 2012. This record consisted of 4 billion inbound messages and 6 billion outbound messages.

Currently, the only BlackBerry smartphone running on BlackBerry 10 is their flagship device Z10. This smartphone was recently launched in India for Rs. 43, 990. The company is expected to launch QWERTY smartphone, dubbed Q10 pretty soon.

BlackBerry had been initially been criticised for not having a robust app ecosystem with its BlackBerry 7 smartphones. The company will be looking at changing the same with the recently launched BlackBerry 10 operating system. At the time of launch, BlackBerry had announced that it has 70,000 apps. However, most of these apps were ported from other leading platforms and the company will have to keep adding new apps to make sure that it is able to play catch with other established platforms such as Android and iOS.

Image Credit: Berry Reivew