The Android application, which Facebook had bought last year for $19 billion, now competes with the mother company itself.
WhatsApp reached a new milestone this week, which pushed the company closer to the exclusive club of social platforms with more than 1 billion active users, Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s co-founder declared on Facebook on Thursday.
The messaging network now boasts 900 million monthly users, which makes it the most popular mobile-exclusive communications network in the world. The Facebook post was short but the message it contained was not something to be taken for granted, as it embodies a notable step forward for the app that’s leading one of the most competitive industries.
Compared to Facebook, which typically has around 1.5 billion monthy active users, WhatsApp still lags behind. However, if we’re taking into consideration that Facebook’s standalone app (Facebook Messenger) reaches 700 million monthly active users, WhatsApp is more popular among mobile users.
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that more than one billion people had simultaneously been online on Facebook.
No other social networks come close to the high active user statistics of these two. At the time Facebook purchased WhatsApp, the application had little over 450 million monthly active users. But the application’s popularity has increased a great deal after merging Facebook.
In July 2015, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that the app doubled its number to 800 million, and it keeps growing. The company expects a further increase by adding more accessibility across devices. For example, last month, a new web service was opened – WhatsApp Web, making the messaging app available to iOS clients.
The Android application also suffered a number of changes since Facebook took over. The company added functions such as mark as unread, the ability to mute chats, emoji skins and custom notifications in order to make the application more flexible than ever before.
Photo credits: flickr
