RIM Kills Off Kik, Says It Breached Contractual Obligations

Recently, Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has removed an application from its BlackBerry App World, namely Kik, which already has a number of almost one million users, and also terminated the relations with Kik.

The popular instant messaging solution was reportedly removed from the list of applications available for download for BlackBerry users due to the fact that it breached contractual obligations.

Here's what an official statement from the BlackBerry maker states on the matter:

“RIM became aware of a number of issues and customer concerns regarding the Kik app and service. Following discussions with Kik, the app was removed from BlackBerry App World on November 12.

Upon further investigation, RIM concluded that Kik had breached contractual obligations. Based on the broad scope and seriousness of the issues and concerns, RIM terminated its agreements with Kik and withdrew RIM's support for Kik's service.”

For the time being, however, there is no specific info on what determined RIM take this radical action against the software solution, though some scenarios are possible.

On the one hand, some suggest that Kik might have rose significant privacy issues, thus determining RIM to remove the app from its store.

On the other hand, however, there is the possibility that the features and functions of Kik became too competitive to RIM's own BlackBerry Messenger, and that RIM found an excuse to eliminate the rival software solution.

Things are not looking to good for Kik users, nor for the application's developer at the moment.

“Kik had already been excluded from BlackBerry App World, so no new Kik downloads have been possible for BlackBerry users. But now RIM has shut down “push” access; as a result, messages to BlackBerry users will be delayed by up to an hour,” a recent post on Kik's blog reads.

“RIM has also now removed access to the BlackBerry Software Development Kit and Signing Keys, so any future development is frozen.”

According to Kik, its relationship with RIM was pretty close, and its apps and services already received various recognitions from the phone maker:

“We have worked day and night to build a super-fast, reliable and free cross-platform instant messaging app. This includes more than a year of development for BlackBerry smartphones. We have worked cooperatively with RIM at every step,” the company notes.

“RIM placed Kik on BlackBerry App World without issue. Kik’s upcoming mobile music service received a special award at BlackBerry DevCon about a year ago, and was named by RIM just six weeks ago as one of the first five featured apps to be included in its upcoming BBM platform.”

However, the company does not offer too many details on what caused RIM to make the move either, so we'll have to wait for further info to be released to learn exactly what this was all about.