What you need to know

  • MediaLab has acquired Kik Messenger, and has announced that Kik Messenger is here to stay.
  • MediaLab has agreed an acquisition with Kik interactive to acquire the service.
  • It had previously been announced that the service would close as its parent company focused on Cryptocurrency.

MediaLab has announced the acquisition of Kik Messenger from Kik Interactive, and the news that it plans to keep Kik Messenger running! Kik's parent company had previously announced plans to shut down the app to focus on cryptocurrency. Now it seems, Kik is here to stay.

MediaLab is a holding company that owns several internet brands including Whisper and Datpiff. Speaking as to the motivation to purchase Kik is said:

Whether it be a passion for an obscure manga or your favorite football team, Kik has shown an incredible ability to provide a platform for new friendships to be forged through your mobile phone. As a group of non conformists ourselves, we resonate with the kik ethos and felt this was a community we wanted to help continue.

With regards to moving forward, MediaLab says it plans to listen to the community so it can figure out how to make the app better. However, initial ideas include larger group sizes and the ability to remove inactive admins. Performance improvements include making the app faster, more reliable and less buggy, as well as making Kik the best place to connect people who have similar interests. They also want to eradicate spam bots and unwanted messages. (who doesn't right?)

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MediaLab does have some plans to pull a few features it thinks aren't well optimized:

This means we're going to need to focus on doing less things, but doing them really well. As part of that increased focus, we've made some decisions to pull back on a few features that we felt weren't optimized. For the time being, we will be discontinuing the video chat toggle as well as the 3rd party bots platform. Don't worry this doesn't include RageBot. (In fact we're hoping to announce some exciting news with the team behind RageBot in the very near future)

Even though Kik Messenger is no longer owned by Kik Interactive, plans to maintain Kin integration are also sticking.

So there you have it. You can read the full presser here, but it seems that at least for now, Kik is here to stay. The app remains available to download, and whilst a few features are being rolled back to improve optimization, it should mean that Kik will be around for many years to come.