No, i think the jump was technical. AIM and similar gen IM protocols expected that you were using a desktop or laptop with a persistent connection. This would

No, i think the jump was technical. AIM and similar gen IM protocols expected that you were using a desktop or laptop with a persistent connection. This would break on iPhone because Apple didn't allow backgrounding. Kik and similar took over once Apple introduced their push notification service. This allowed apps to behave closer to text messaging.