Kik Messenger is a popular instant messaging application for Android and iOS mobile devices. It has been around for at least ten years and has gained millions of users. Despite its success, Kik Interactive Inc. had plans to close the application in order to direct its full attention to a cryptocurrency called Kin.
Hundreds of millions of Kik users were disappointed by the news. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like Kik is going anywhere, after all. The company recently announced that it is no longer closing the application because another company is going to take over ownership of it.
If you can recall, Kik Interactive was sued by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations that the company raised $100 million illegally by selling digital tokens of their “Kin’ currency in 2017. The SEC claims they needed to declare Kin as a security to sell the digital tokens legally. Kik Interactive claims Kin is not a security, but rather a cryptocurrency. If they were to call it a security, then it would destroy its usability and potentially threaten the usability of other cryptocurrencies of the industry.
According to a tweet from Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston, they just signed a letter with another company that wants to purchase the Kik Messenger application. This new company, MediaLab, not only wants to take over ownership, but they want to expand on the application by improving the features for its millions of loyal users.
Kik Messenger has been free to users since it came out. However, MediaLab plans to introduce advertisements into the application in order to pay for the expenses associated with it on their end. Although the users might not like the advertisements, the revenue generated would allow MediaLab to finance future upgrades and improvements to the application. They plan to eliminate more of its bugs so that it can be more dependable and much faster than it is now.
About MediaLab
MediaLab is a company based in Santa Monica. The currently own a music sharing platform called DatPiff and another messaging application called Whisper. Now their latest venture is to acquire the Kik Messenger application and make improvements to it. These improvements will be based on the suggestions made by its active users in the community. Better speed, reduced bugginess, and more dependability are their three main goals.
Furthermore, MediaLab is giving new hope to the employees of the platform because they’ll get to continue working on it for the company. The current users can continue using the Kik Messenger application as normal. As the updates are made to the application, all the existing users will automatically download the updates onto their mobile devices.
Conclusion
Kik Messenger has roughly 300 million users who are registered. It competes against other renowned messaging applications, such as Facebook Messenger, Line, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Kik hasn’t been able to grow its number of active users in recent years because of its lack of updates. But that is soon going to change after MediaLab gets to work on it.
Users can expect the updates to be made over the next several months. You’ll suddenly start seeing better group settings, an overall better performance, reduced SPAM, and faster messaging. Yes, you may see the occasional pop-up advertisement, but that is to be expected for the number of enhancements that are coming in the near future.
As for Kik Interactive and its Kin cryptocurrency, no one knows what is going to happen there. They insist on keeping its cryptocurrency label rather than labeling it a security. Their legal battle with the SEC will determine Kin’s fate.