Voicemail is dead. Visual Voicemail, however, is a different story. Those who have it love it — and those that don’t have it, want it. Even if you loathe voicemail as much as we do, you’re going to have to check yours sooner or later (or not) — and unless you like spending 10 minutes touchtoning your way through a system built a decade ago, doing it through Visual Voicemail is the only way to go.
Unfortunately, Visual Voicemail still isn’t a standard feature on every smartphone — but in most cases, a third party solution is available. Later today, one of these third party solutions, YouMail, will announce that they’ve cracked through their 2 millionth download.
Downloads are one thing, but how many people are actually using it? We asked YouMail about their active userbase, but they dodged the question by saying that they had “1.5 million registered users” as of December, and that “the user retention rate has been pretty high.”
YouMail says a large majority of their 2 million downloads are BlackBerry users. This makes sense; while the service is also available for iOS and Android, the former has its own Visual Voicemail system baked in, and a good number of carriers have tacked their own Visual Voicemail system into their handsets running the latter. A vast majority of BlackBerry handsets, meanwhile, don’t have any sort of official system in place. Add in the fact that RIM has featured the heck out of this app and that it has more or less dominated the BlackBerry App World’s productivity section since launch, and the numbers all come together.
CrunchBase Information
YouMail
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