Messaging App “Kik” Seeing Explosive Growth

With over 50 million users and 200,000 downloads per day, upstart messaging app Kik is crushing the competition. Messaging app services have been popping up all over the place, but Kik’s amazing traction has gotten the attention of some big players in the tech world.

During an interview with Inside Mobile Apps, Kik CEO Ted Livingston said, “They’re [Facebook] making a bold statement that messaging is the killer app in mobile,” he says. “Until recently, people dismissed all these group messenger apps, but this is Facebook clearly saying the person that owns messaging is going to win this era of computing period. Home fundamentally is all about messaging, from the Chat Heads to the home screen, it’s all messaging.

Kik’s platform is unique in its mobile first strategy and user centric experience complete with easy to navigate privacy controls and discovery mechanisms. The company is hitting critical mass and benefiting big time from the network effect, where the app becomes more appealing as more and more people join, they push their friends to download the app as well. Kik is showing strength in a fiercely competitive market, going up against titans like Facebook Messenger, Apple’s iMessage, and Google’s new Babel app.

As an iPhone app developer in San Diego its easy to recognize that Kik has created an immense amount of value for their user base and is being rewarded for releasing a well crafted product. At the current rate of exponential growth it will probably be only a few more months before the team announces that they’ve hit the 100 million user mark. I predict Kik to be a likely acquisition target for one of the big tech players such as Google, Facebook, or Microsoft as they’ve carved out a scalable and valuable technology that is being rapidly adopted by mobile consumers worldwide.