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I don't get it. Kik could give me direct API access to their servers. Or I could run my own Jabber/XMPP servers. What's the benefit of piping through another App on the client?

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In a similar fashion, Amazon could give you the physical keys from their AWS datacentres or otherwise you could just buy some hardware, install linux on all of them and run your own cloud infrastructure.

It's exaggerated, of course, but i hope rationale behind the api is more clear this way :)

I'm saying that [Client A -> Server -> Client B] is better than [Client A -> Kik Client A -> Kik Server -> Kik Client B -> Client B].

I think the benefit is that in the first scenario, you have to maintain the server yourself. In the second, you only have to worry about the clients. It's definitely a trade off, but for some developers, the benefit of not having to maintain server infrastructure might outweigh the cost of the added complexity of going through Kik.

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