Kik for iPhone
Download Kik for iPhone
What our users think
"well live my iPhone 6"
- Play games in the app
- Effortless to use
- Send movies, photos, sketches and memes
Softonic Review
Karen McC (@karenmccandless)
Kik is a messaging app that permits people to talk with friends and strangers by using usernames rather than phone numbers.
Talk – with anyone you like
To sign up with Kik, you need to provide your name (real or not) and then pick a username as this is how your friends (and random people) will find you. While it makes it much firmer to find friends, as you can’t automatically populate your friends list via phone number, it does provide that extra layer of privacy since you don’t have to give out any individual details. If you don’t want people to find you, all you have to do is give a fake name.
Once you’ve found some friends who are also using Kik you can commence talking by clicking on the talk bubble. Be warned, you will almost certainly receive spam messages from people you don’t know, albeit you can block people or mute talks for certain periods of time, which can help if people bombard you with messages or get irritating.
Kik permits you to create groups of up to fifty members, which can either be invite only or public. If you make the group public you can add a hashtag so people can search and join (again expect some spammers). There seem to be groups for most user interests and businesses are also getting in on the act by creating their own groups to build up ‘followers’.
When talking you can see if your friends have read the message (albeit not when they read it) and there is no option to turn this off (similar to WhatsApp’s blue ticks feature). Albeit it doesn’t tell you when your friend was last online.
Kik isn’t as utter featured as other messaging services, as there are no options to make calls, share your location or send audio. However, you can play game in Kik, share photos, and send stickers, YouTube movies, sketches and memes.
What you see is what you get
Kik sports a fairly basic interface with very few customization options. While you can switch the color of your talk bubbles, there is no option to alter the background to your talks. The talks in this app look similar to the traditional SMS messaging services that come as standard on phones. Telling that, the interface is effortless to navigate and it will take you no time at all to get up and running with Kik.
Lags behind its competitors
As a messaging app, Kik doesn’t compare well with the likes of WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, LINE, KakaoTalk and so on. It lacks the features of these other apps and it doesn’t have any niche options that makes it stand out (such as privacy and security in the case of Telegram). While the capability to join groups according to hashtags is an interesting idea, Kik lacks the capability to only approve certain people, which would help keep the spam levels down.
If you want to talk and play games with strangers and random people then Kik could be a good option for you. However, as with many of these talk apps, your choice about whether or not to use Kik may depend on how many of your friends are signed up. And, while Kik’s aim seems to be to incorporate features that make it a one-stop-shop for users needs, rather than just being a messaging app, the fact that it lacks so many basic features is likely to stop it becoming a market leader.
Switches
Previously there was no movie functionality, but now you can record movies from directly in the app and send these to friends in Kik Messenger. Albeit there is still no live movie talk feature.