WhatsApp has had several milestone achievements in its 7 years of existence and it is thanks to its cross platform availability. You can say it killed the MMS (remember that?) and made it easy to chat with your friends and family easily and conveniently.
Thanks to its cross platform availability, WhatsApp has been able to amass a huge active user base. It was downloaded over a billion times on the Play store. Last year on January, they announced that they had passed the 700 million active users mark. Just 3 months later, they added another extra 100 million users. However for 5 months during the year, the growth slowed down where they grew to 900 million users on September. We have been waiting for them to hit the iconic 1 ion users and they have finally attained it!
Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s co-founder broke the news on his Facebook page of his company’s latest milestone complete with other statistics about the company:
- 42 billion messages are sent per day up from 30 billion announced last year
- Users have created a billion groups which is astounding
- 1.6 billion photos and 250 million videos are shared every day
- 53 languages are now supported on the platform
Koum was happy about the milestone where he said “One billion users. Couldn’t be more proud of our small team doing so much in just seven years.” The team is indeed small with 57 engineers and he took the time to announce that the company is hiring.
The company should now focus on keeping up with its sister app, Facebook Messenger which rivals it in terms of functionality and the number of active users. It also needs to worry about Telegram Messenger which most people ran to when WhatsApp is down or has been banned. We have seen leaks of new functionality that will be added to the platform like voice calling and sharing account details with Facebook. We hope that this year, more stuff will be added so that it remains the leading chatting platform in the world.
