Are free messaging Apps genuine? There are lot of free messaging Apps in the App store. 

I would like to know whether the following two apps are genuine : way2sms and Kik

And I was just wondering, how are they able develop such apps and allow people to use it for free ?
Yes, such apps are genuine.

I am not familiar with Kik, but assuming it is similar to way2sms, they gain advertising revenue from page views.

Kik mentions having over 120 million users and way2sms has 40 million+ users.

For example for the 40 million users of way2sms, assuming that the advertising rate is $0.01 per 1000 page views (I'm not sure about the actual rates). And assuming an average of 10 page views per user per week. Which gives 400 million page views a week. 

Then the advertising earnings will be $4000 per week. (The above is just an example, I'm sure I made a lot of wrong assumptions)


  So the way2sms business model is to buy messages from network
  operators and give these messages free to the users, and recoup the
  cost from advertising revenue gained from page views.


I'm assuming kik does somethig similar.

A brief interview with the founder of way2sms can be found here.
And another article here.

Edit : I did some reading up on Kik, I didn't find much but I think they use a freemium model where their app and basic services are free but they charge for some additional services.

For example, they charge money for some stickers.