Back in January, Whatsapp co-founder Jan Koum took to Facebook to tell the world that the hit messaging application had reached the 700 million monthly active users mark. On Friday last week, he took to the same platform to update us on the latest. Whatsapp has now added 100 million more monthly active users to have the figure standing at 800 million at the moment, at least according to Mr Koum.
The 800 MAUs figure puts Whatsapp several steps close to its current owner Facebook’s 1.4 billion monthly active users and far away from other social apps like siblings Instagram’s 300 million MAUs and Messenger’s 600 million. Twitter stands at a further 284 million monthly active users. With such growth, Whatsapp is set to have a billion MAUs; it’s just a matter of when? It already has over a billion downloads on the Google Play Store and counting.
Even with such phenomenal growth, Whatsapp continues to rollout much requested features to its users. It has already brought Whatsapp to the desktop, introduced voice calling on Android (and working on bringing it to iOS and Windows Phone later) and recently, it’s been testing integrating chat backup with Google Drive. To provide a unified experience to all its users, it has taken to forcing everyone to use its official applications instead of third party clients.
What can possibly stop Whatsapp at the moment?
