It goes without saying that WhatsApp is one of the most popular cross-platform messaging platforms in the world. Hundreds of millions of people use it every single day to send billions of messages. There have been many other contenders but no one has been able to eclipse WhatsApp’s sheer user stats. The Facebook-owned company has grown even further, it now services 800 million active users worldwide.
This was revealed by WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum in a Facebook post. “now serving 800,000,000 monthly active users,” he wrote, while cautioning the press that “active and registered users are not the same thing.”
Indeed they’re not. A service can have a hundred million registered users but what really matters is how many of those users actively use the service.
In WhatsApp’s case there are at least 800 million people by the company’s own estimate that use its service actively every month. This is significantly more than the likes of BlackBerry Messenger, Line, Viber and others.
WhatsApp’s numbers may grow substantially in the months to come as it flipped the switch on a feature that it has lacked since day one: the ability to make voice calls. WhatsApp voice calling is now active on Android and the company plans to bring this feature to iOS as well in the coming weeks.
People who opted for the company’s rivals only because they offered voice calling might soon return, and who knows, WhatsApp might hit that one billion milestone soon than we can imagine.