There is no shortage of cross-platform instant messaging applications. There’s market leader WhatsApp with over 350 million users and then there are other strong players such as Viber, Line, Kik etc all of which have seen substantial growth in recent years. Even BlackBerry Messenger saw a surge in its user base once it was finally opened up to iOS and Android. Kik has achieved a major milestone, CEO Ted Livingston announced today that the service has crossed 100 million users and it is substantially growing as over 200,000 new users are added every single day.
Kik sees greater penetration in the U.S. because according to the CEO, over fifty percent of its entire user base lives in the U.S. Referencing recent numbers released by app analytics firm Distimo, Livingston also said that Kik now gets more downloads in the U.S. than WhatsApp. He believes one of the reason why Kik is becoming so popular is because users don’t have to sign up with their phone numbers. So if they want to add someone on Kik they don’t have to reveal their number. It is the exact same premise that BlackBerry promoted when it made BBM cross-platform, funny thing is, Livingston pitched the idea of taking BBM cross-platform to company executives when he worked at BlackBerry but he was shot down. He launched Kik instead, and the rest as they say is history.