The Kik Messenger mobile app has 300 million users. It is unusual for a company to remove their app from the marketplace after it has accumulated such a large userbase. Apparently, that is what’s going to happen according to the announcement made last month by Ted Livingstone, who is the founder of Kik Interactive and its Kik Messenger app.
There has been a lot of speculation as to when Kik Messenger will officially shut down. Representatives of Kik Interactive have confirmed the official shut down date of Kik Messenger will be on October 19th, 2019. This happens to be exactly 9 years from the date in which Kik Messenger was first released. The date of its initial release was October 19th, 2010. It seems only right for the company to shut down the app on its 9-year anniversary date.
The last release of Kik was a beta release called Kik X. It contained a lot of new features and updates for the last officially released version of the app. There was going to be a new official version released until this news of the shutdown came about. Now the company is preparing to halt the development of all future releases and shut down the existing releases. No one knows exactly what the new features would have been if the shut down wasn’t going to take place.
With 300 million worldwide users of the app, there is going to be a lot of disappointment in the mobile app messaging community. Kik Interactive defends this tough decision because they’re investing substantial amounts of money in fighting for their Kin cryptocurrency creation. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has accused the company of not registering Kin as a security offering during its initial coin offering. Kik Interactive states the accusations have no truth to them.
Kik Interactive’s legal battle with the SEC has already cost them $5 million. They didn’t have any more money and resources to utilize unless they downsized their company in certain areas. Since most of their other resources were exhausted by the Kik Messenger app, the most logical action to take was shutting it down and applying their resources into Kin and the legal battle surrounding it.
Kik Interactive may have a rival in the cryptocurrency world. Telegram, the maker of a cloud-based instant messaging app, is forming their own blockchain called the Telegram Open Network and its associated cryptocurrency, Gram. Their initial coin offering generated $1.7 billion for them, which the SEC didn’t even dispute. This makes Telegram already ahead of Kik Interactive in terms of money and SEC leniency.