Kelsey Walter
Copy Writer
The owner and creator of popular social media texting app ‘Kik’ announced on Sept. 27 the team will be shutting down the app entirely.
According to BBC News, the decision had been forced on the developers by a legal wrangle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over Kik.
The company founder Ted Livingstone posted a blog post on Sept. 25, stating that the team as a whole is now going to be focusing on the cryptocurrency Kin.
Because of this, they are going to be cutting their team from 100 to 19 people, leaving many unemployed.
According to Decrypt, the app will be completely terminated on Oct. 19 and will be slowly deleting different accounts until the final shut down.
Kik messenger was released in 2010, and quickly became one of the more popular apps among many younger people, with over 300 million downloads across different devices.
The app was useful for people who had multiple online friends and was useful for large group chats as well.
Some people were upset to hear the news because of the friends they made online through Kik.
Junior English major, Gabrielle Stanley, commented on how upset she was that the app was closing.
“I’ve been in a group chat with my friends from England since my freshman year of high school, and now we don’t really know where to go since none of us use Facebook and it costs money for us to text,” said Stanley.
Jonathan Carter, senior biology major, explaining that he used Kik as a way to talk to his online friends as well:
“We’ve been using the app since nearly 2012, it’s just a little frustrating that I need to get a new app to talk to my friends on, and if some of them don’t answer before I’m able to get ahold of them, does that mean we’re screwed,” said Carter.
Others find the closing of the app insignificant because they haven’t used it in years, while others think the closing of the app is actually a pretty good idea due to the issues that came from it over the years.
Some students described their experience or lack of experience with Kik.
Thais Rivera, an ESU sophomore said she never used it, so it really did not matter to her but a lot of her friends were upset about it.
“I never personally used the app myself. I always just gave people my number, but I know a couple of people who are really upset that it’s shutting down. I’m just not one of them,” said Riveria.
According to BBC News, there were many scandals that surrounded the app, such as a BBC News investigation that took place in 2018, suggesting Kik was involved with 1,100 UK child sex abuse cases.
“I’ve never met anyone weird on there, but I know a lot of my friends used to get a lot of nudes from random dudes on the app all the time,” said Stanley. “I honestly just think it’s the people you talk to at the time but I know that there was a lot of weird stuff going on the app.”
Many of the people I spoke to on this issue said that they will either be moving to Discord or Skype, but they are worried about getting ahold of the people that they actually talked to.
Email Kelsey:
Kwalter7@live.esu.edu