WhatsApp and Kik Messenger (among others) are thriving in the new mobile chat frontier.
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Hard to say what went down, and Kik's official response doesn't do much to clear up the situation.
ENGADGET: RIM: Kik was pulled from App World over 'breached contractual obligations'
Kik is a free mobile messaging service with 50 million users that is transforming itself into a social platform.
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Canadian messaging app Kik has more than 50 million registered users and six games that it has developed in-house for its platform.
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Rival Kik and the messaging-and-calling service Viber have also both said they are moving towards becoming social platform that act as secondary market places for apps.
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But youth are really flocking to Snapchat, WhatsApp, GroupMe and Kik, real-time, messaging services that were born mobile, offer more privacy and are proactively partnering with telcos.
Last week, a social messaging app called Kik announced that an a HTML5-based web app platform it had created on top of its texting service could now send push notifications.
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Instead, the post is more of a PR play, praising the relationship Kik's had with RIM in the past and saying it doubts rumors that BBM envy could account for the pull.
ENGADGET: RIM: Kik was pulled from App World over 'breached contractual obligations'
Kik is a popular alternative that not only pushes messages but also includes a bevy of metadata that helps contextualize chat conversations like knowing when a message has been delivered and read.
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Voice-over-Internet apps like Skype allow users to make voice calls over the Internet while instant-message apps from WhatsApp to Kik let people exchange text and photos without being charged for a text message.
Kik is now 30 million users strong.
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Livingston founded Kik Interactive in 2009 at the University of Waterloo and released the Kik Messenger in October 2010, just as other messaging apps like WhatsApp and GroupMe were also emerging and starting to gain traction.
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Though the company has thrown up a public response on its blog, it doesn't clarify what transpired, what "contractual obligations" were allegedly breached, or what (if anything) Kik might do to attempt to smooth over the spat.
ENGADGET: RIM: Kik was pulled from App World over 'breached contractual obligations'
It does say, however, that RIM has fully revoked Kik's access to push notifications and the BlackBerry SDK, so it's going to be tough for these guys to stay relevant on Bolds and Curves across the land unless RIM reverses its decision.
ENGADGET: RIM: Kik was pulled from App World over 'breached contractual obligations'
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