When it comes to popularity contests, Kik Messenger is a sure winner, even without the heavy advertising often pushed by its competitors in the mobile messaging space.
Despite the lack of advertising, Kik has surpassed over 50 million users, with over 200,000 new users choosing to communicate on Kik every day. Kik is also releasing version 6.3 for iPhone and Android, bringing new features like in-app push notifications, a first for HTML5 development, and improved organization of its HTML5 apps, Cards.
“We are excited that 50 million users have already embraced Kik as the best way to communicate one-to-one in mobile,” said Kik CEO Ted Livingston. “We expect this number to continue to grow as we add new experiences to Cards, utilizing the HTML5 tools and libraries we have spent almost two years perfecting.”
While the Windows Phone version which hasn’t been updated in over a year, the fact that it surpassed 50 million on all three platforms combined using only user word-of-mouth is vastly impressive.
The company’s tremendous growth can be attributed to a couple of things. First, early on, Kik transitioned from a phone number-based login to a username system, making it easy to share your credentials and interact without friction. Second, Kik has always been known as the fastest messenger on mobile devices; it doesn’t attempt to sync with the web, nor does it allow multiple logins. This ensures transmission is full duplex between two users or a group, and avoids any server-based disorganization. Thirdly, of course, are the messaging app’s built-in Cards.
There are currently five Cards to choose from, including YouTube, Reddit, Image Search, Sketch, and a recently launched game, Squared, which we reviewed back in March and which now has seen over 1 million installs, and over 30 million minutes of combined total user playing time in just over a month.
Continuing to build on the company’s vision of providing users with the best messaging experience on mobile, version 6.3 that was just released for Android and iOS further simplifies the experience and provides tighter integration to Cards. With a new in-app push notification feature that includes message previews, users can now see their messages as they come in and receive updates when they’re received something new from Cards, without having to navigate away from what they’re currently doing in Kik. Users can also organize their Cards by using the new “Favorites” feature.
Kik is definitely a fun and engaging application with which to play games and stay in touch with friends. Now if we can get an update that includes Cards for Windows Phone users, we’ll be “kiking” ourselves happy.
