BANGALORE: WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced in a facebook post that the trendy messaging service has currently hit 700 million monthly active users accumulating from 600 million in August. He further stated that over 30 billion messages are sent daily. Although there is a stiff competition with a number of chat apps available like Hike, Line and WeChat, the messaging app has had a colossal growth of 100 million users in just four months, reports NDTV gadgets.
Apparently, the figure has placed WhatApp as one of the world's largest social networks, out numbering Twitter's 284 million or even the photo-sharing service Instagram, obtaining 300 million users last month. Moreover, if its growth continues to build at the current rate with new features such as voice calling and end-to-end encryption adding up, it will hit 1 billion users within a year.
Earlier, WhatsApp's Business Head Neeraj Arora announced that WhatsApp had 70 million users in India which is a tenth of the company's user base. With these figures, telecom firms in India have been coaxing the government to equal the opportunity with Over The Top (OTT) services like WhatsApp or Skype.
With the news that WhatsApp’s impending voice calling feature was soon to be released, Airtel discreetly began its move, rolling out special plan to charge separately for data used on VoIP calls, however, the company has now retrace its steps for now.
Last year, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $22 billion where the messaging app at that time had only 450 million users. Furthermore, Face book’s own messaging service, Facebook Messenger, had over 500 million monthly active users in November from 200 million in April.
Earlier, Koum had said that although the two services Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp had similar features, It wouldn’t be able to compete with each other.
The two services - Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp - both have many similar features, but in the past, Koum has said that the two don't compete, given that Messenger was directed at Facebook friends, while WhatsApp was set for a broader spectrum of mobile users
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