KIK – is a Canadian messenger, which was created in 2009. A group of young boys from the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) has decided to move away from the traditional applications for computers and focus on the smartphone owners. Chinese messenger WeChat served as an example for them, as in 2009 it could be easily called a chat platform. KIK has also decided to focus on web applications inside the messenger.
Kik Interactive, led by Ted Livingston, raised $ 70.5 in the last round of investments, and a few months later broke the mark of 200 million users.
Below is our KIK review for you.
Major outlines:
- Messenger is available on platforms Android, iOS, BlackBerry / Symbian and Windows Phone. Unfortunately, the official blog of the company does not report on the possible releases of the client for PC or the web version of the application.
- When registering in KIK, one does not necessarily indicate a telephone number. But when creating a new profile, a user will need to specify the name, user name, e-mail and password to the account. And voila!
- To find new friends on KIK, user need to know their user names. The app does not synchronises contacts from your phone automatically.
- Correspondence in KIK made using ordinary text messages, you can also create group chats.
- Unfortunately, KIK can not send a voice message, as well as make an audio or video call.
- KIK does not require a user to indicate his/her phone number in the registration, which means that calls to mobile numbers from application are not possible.
- KIK allows users to share photos and videos, although there are some limitations in size – up to 12 MB. If the file is downloaded from a browser or there is a link to it, no problems should arise. But other file formats can not be shared.
- KIK offers users a fairly wide range of stickers, both free and paid. Usually the fee-paying stickers set is usually less than 2 US dollars.
- For those users who lack the standard images and stickers to express their emotions, the KIK developers have implemented sketches feature.
- There is no advertising in KIK. There is also no public chat rooms as, for example, in Viber, or advertising spam messages. Users admire this.
- KIK has positioned itself as a super fast messenger, and for good reason. The speed of delivery of messages is really high. Also, the user can see the delivery status and read status of their messages.
- One of the downsides of the messenger is the lack of synchronization with different devices. For example, having installed the application on their tablet, users will not be able to view the latest correspondence from the phone, and see only new messages.
- KIK design is very simple, and UI friendly. You can see which of your contacts are online right now, change profile and group chats avatars.
- Messenger does not have ‘share the location’ function.
- A distinctive feature of the Canadian application is a built-in browser, with which one can find interesting content and media without leaving the application. Users noted that this browser has room to grow, but when you consider that we meet such a function in the messenger for the first time, the praise should be appropriate.
- Links from the browser are posted in the chat already with a preview, so each user can control his/her chat.
Interesting facts about the KIK messenger:
Ted Livingston had a hard time convincing the investors in the success of the project – negotiation process took about six months.
The idea of a messenger came to Ted, when he worked for BlackBerry.
As a BlackBerry employee, Livingstone first wanted to integrate KIK with BBM, and make a cross-platform application, but, fortunately, this did not happen.
Initially the messenger was called KIK Chat, in the manner of WeChat, and for the first 15 days, won the audience of 1 million users.
Loading...
