Samsung's ChatON Reaches 100 Million Users: BlackBerry for Android and iOS Still Unreleased

It didn't get there first, but then again, the company certainly isn't struggling: Samsung's ChatON messaging services has more users across Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry, than BlackBerry Messenger.

As BlackBerry Messenger's launch on iPhone, iPad, and Android devices continues to be delayed (at the time of writing this), Samsung has announced that ChatON now has a "global subscriber base of over 100 million users." That's not all. The South Korean tech giant's messaging app and service only had 50 million subscribers in May of this year, meaning that ChatON has doubled in size in only four months.

It doesn't hurt that ChatON is pre-loaded in most of Samsung's major releases now - including the Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note 2, Galaxy S4, and, now, the soon-to-be-released Galaxy Note 3. ChatON enjoys most of its popularity in India, China, and the U.S., according to Samsung, and it's growing in the Middle East and Europe.

Samsung boasts, "The service was designed to ensure that users across the globe can communicate in multiple languages - ChatON currently supports 63 languages in major countries of the world. ChatON was designed in line with Samsung's drive to deliver product that meet specific local needs in different markets." For example, stated the Samsung release, "In India... ChatON has seen exponential growth as the service supports 10 regional dialects, with plans to support 13 dialects by the end of 2013."

Samsung's preferred messaging service still cannot compete with WhatsApp. Launched in 2009 - two years before ChatON and when BlackBerry Messenger was roughly in its 5^th incarnation - WhatsApp now has around 300 million users. BlackBerry has about 75 million users on BBM, according to CNET. And, of course, BBM is expected to garner more users across Android and iOS, whenever the BBM app finally launches.

A word of caution on Samsung's announcement about its ChatON service: according to CNET, ChatON is counting registered - rather than active - users. Daily use is the way WhatsApp and BBM counts it. However, that means that about 100 million people have at least signed in and tried ChatON, and, that figure ought to counts for something, if only as a reminder of how many mobile devices Samsung can push across the globe.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry Messenger is on hold, at least until an unofficial Android version of the BBM app can be cleared from the company's BBM servers. The unofficial Android version leaked the same weekend that BlackBerry had announced BBM would launch for Android and iOS.

That older, unofficial version had an issue that, according to BlackBerry 's executive vice president Andrew Bocking, "resulted in volumes of data traffic orders of magnitude higher than normal for each active user." BlackBerry delayed the launch for at least a week while focusing on "adjusting the system to completely block this unreleased version of the Android appwhen we go live to the official BBM for Android app."

BlackBerry - which has lost 1 billion in the most recent quarter and is having trouble finding a private buyer, in order to take its shares off of the stock market - found a silver lining in its most recent messenger for iOS and Android debacle. According to Bocking, about 1 million Android users tried to use the unofficial app, which was only available on file-sharing sites.