Kik, the messaging app started by a former BlackBerry employee, reached 100 million registered users, adding 70 million users over the past 12 months. It is reportedly adding 200,000 users per day.

The company has seen significant interest in the Kik Card system, launched a year ago, which allows apps to run on top of the messaging service via an HTML5-based platform.

Kik founder Ted Livingston told The Wall Street Journal that 145 million Cards have now been downloaded. The company found that 83 per cent of Kik Cards are discovered when a user sends a Card to another within the app.

Kik’s growth is impressive but in terms of total user numbers, lags behind market leader WhatsApp with 350 million monthly active users. Tencent’s Weixin/WeChat has 272 million users and Viber has more than 200 million users.

However, Kik is performing strongly in the US, according to app analyst firm Distimo, which found that only Snapchat and BlackBerry Messenger were bigger between 21 October and 21 November.

Kik’s Livingston previously worked on BlackBerry Messenger and had pushed the idea of making the messaging app available on all platforms, in a bid to take on Apple and Android.

BBM was recently launched for Android and iOS, seeing 20 million downloads during its first week of availability, taking its user base, including BlackBerry users, to 80 million.

In October, BlackBerry and Kik settled a patent infringement dispute, nearly three years after Kik was pulled from the device vendor’s app store. The struggling handset vendor sued Kik on the grounds that it made false and/or misleading statements that caused confusion with BBM.

Kik secured $19.5 million in venture funding in April.