Kik Messenger Windows Phone launch gives them Android and iOS bump
If you follow smartphone news at all, you know that any time a review is posted, or another patent lawsuit is announced, the fanboys and fangirls will come out in the comments and talk smack to each other. They’ll trumpet their OS while saying all others are inferior choices.
Throwing that attitude on its head is a new article from TechCrunch about Kik Messenger, and what happened when it launched the Windows Phone 7 version of their cross platform messaging platform. According to the Waterloo, Ontario company’s data, every new Windows Phone 7 user was actually worth 2.53 new users, from both Android and iOS. When tracking new users out, Kik found that once the Windows Phone version launched, there was a 22% bonus increase in sign ups for the iOS and Android versions of the software.
Kik CEO Ted Livingstone sums it up thusly:
Windows Phone users may be a small segment of the whole, but they bring with them all their friends on other mobile platforms, creating a huge and unanticipated spike in Kik activity.
It’s time for cross-platform apps to start paying attention to Windows Phone 7.
While this halo effect coming from Windows Phone 7 is one of many indicators that WP7 may have a future, there’s something else I took away from this. Unlike flamebait catching headlines in the tech blogosphere, people in the real world don’t seem to hold their friends’ platform choices against them… mostly.
(chart from TechCrunch article)
