Struggling Blackberry has seen major success with downloads of its messenger service on Androids and iPhones, News24 reported Wednesday.
"In just 24 hours BBM has been downloaded over 10 million times by Android and iPhone users, one of the best single-day openings for a mobile app to date," the company said in a statement News24 reported.
The record comes even after the program was delayed from its Sept. 22 release date, and appeared fraudulent to users, which included some who were not able to download the software to their device at first.
"We intend to be the leading private social network for everyone who needs the immediate communication and collaboration of instant messaging combined with the privacy, control and reliability delivered through BBM," said Andrew Bocking, executive vice president of BBM at BlackBerry.
Samsung smartphones in South Africa, will have the program soon before other competitors release it.
"The anticipation is high. We are delighted that we are able to offer our loyal customers an advantage to download BBM," George Ferreira, chief operations officer of Samsung Electronics Africa told News 24.
The blackberry messenger service is just one of many chat applications on smartphones. These include, WeChat, WhatsApp and Mxit.
Customers who had already signed up to find out about Blackberry's new messenger service could quickly obtain the app when it was release on Tuesday while those who did not had to wait for an unspecified time BBC News reported.
Last year, Blackberry lost $646 million when its revenue significantly decreased 40 percent to $11 billion The Wall Street Journal reported. This year, the company lost four million subscribers and suffered another decrease of $84 million in the fiscal quarter that ended June 1.
Blackberry made a smaller amount of cuts over the summer from its sales, and research, and development departments. This comes just a year after the company let go 5,000 people.
As of March, Blackberry had 12,700 employees, which was the last time it revealed a total number. Two years ago, over 17,000 employees worked at the company based in Waterloo, Ontorio Canada. Blackberry also had control of 14 percent of the smartphone business. This has since dropped to less than three percent.
