WhatsApp has grown huge to become one of the most popular instant messaging service available today with a whopping 430 million monthly active users by end of December last year.
Addressing the DLD Conference in Germany, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum confirmed that the app at present handles 430 million active users a month with users sending and receiving a whopping 50 billion messages daily. The number has almost doubled as compared to over 27 billion WhatsApp messages being sent on a daily basis recorded in June last year.
As of November last year, WhatsApp had 400 million active users – meaning that the company added 30 million active users in just a month. This equals the user base of Snapchat!
Koum said that, “We just want to focus on messaging. If people want to play games there are plenty of other sites and also a lot of great companies building services around advertising. It’s a ‘free market’ with apps, so the beauty is that people can get those features elsewhere”.
The 50 billion messages a day milestone according to some reports means that WhatsApp could have finally overtaken the number of SMSes sent. The decline in SMSes has resulted from the growing popularity of instant messaging services like WhatsApp, LINE, Snapchat, Viber which offer similar messaging tools but with more advanced features and at a much cheaper price and sometimes for free.
