It has been well documented over the last few years about the dwindling market share that smartphone manufacturer BlackBerry has, but the company is fighting back first with the launch of the BlackBerry 10 operating system and more recently with the shock news that its BBM service will have cross platform support. If you think about it though BBM for Android and iPhone makes perfect business sense going forward.

The news that broke last week about the company making arguably its main weapon it had left in its smartphone armoury, BBM, free to users on other platforms shocked many watchers. The platform is still used by millions of users especially among teenagers, but with this move those that still use the service will still be able to reach their friends that may have left for pastures new in the smartphone world.

My daughter still uses a Blackberry device and is always on her device using BBM to message her friends hardly ever using the SMS text message allowance, and one of the main reasons for this is the use of the physical QWERTY keyboard and the service itself allows for the quick replying to messages received.

For her friends that don’t have a BlackBerry device she uses the popular WhatsApp service that while is free for the first year then requires a small fee thereafter. While the cost is relatively small most people like to get something for nothing and the user base for WhatsApp is huge but having a free alternative may see more users eventually using BBM, and in turn some of these users may then decide to pick up a nice new BlackBerry 10 device.

Of course there are plenty of other alternatives available such as the recently launched Google Hangouts application, but it will be interesting to see how many people on Android and iOS decide to use BBM over other services.

Are you looking forward to BBM becoming available on Android and iOS?