Visual voicemail company YouMail has released a new update for its BlackBerry app, adding a few new features to enhance its functionality. At the same time YouMail regretfully announced this will be the last update for BlackBerry at least for a while, due to a "steady exodus" of users, who are moving to competing mobile operating systems.

In a company blog post on Friday, April 13, YouMail revealed that the number of people using the app on BlackBerry devices has dramatically decreased, as increasingly more users have shifted to other mobile platforms such as Apple's iOS or Google's Android OS.

Bittersweet

"It's a bittersweet release for us," said YouMail. "We are suspending doing any further work on our BlackBerry app, at least for now," added the statement. "This was a tough decision, especially since the BlackBerry is what got us our first million registered users and put us on the map as a company. But over the past year we've seen our BlackBerry audience steadily shrink, with a steady exodus of those users moving to the iPhone and to Android."

According to YouMail, the app has more Windows Phone users than BlackBerry users, and they don't even have an official YouMail app for Windows Phone. "On many days we're now getting fewer BB users than Windows Phone 7 users, and we don't even have a Windows Phone app!" said YouMail CEO Alex Quilici. The YouMail app still ranks as one of the Top 10 most popular productivity apps in BlackBerry's App World store, but the number of customers has decreased significantly.

Not All Hope is Lost

Although this is the last update for now, the possibility of future updates is not ruled out completely. "If BlackBerry stages a comeback (and we're definitely rooting for BB10 to take off!) or we can figure out how to drive a meaningful number of new BlackBerry users, we'll be back," the company wrote in its blog post.

Meanwhile, the new update for BlackBerry includes a few new features, such as blocking unwanted callers from contacting you. The update also got rid of ads, making the app not only free, but ad-free as well, and comes with a revamped user interface that is now faster and more stable. It also includes "a ton of other bug fixes and more minor feature additions," so at least BlackBerry users are in good hands for now, while YouMail pursues more promising endeavors.

(reported by Alexandra Burlacu, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)