Messaging and VoIP service WhatsApp has now hit 900 million monthly active users, chief executive Jan Koum revealed in a Facebook post.
Koum updated his status along with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbeg and there was this bit of social media bonhomie:
To put this in context, earlier in March, WhatsApp hit one billion downloads on the Google Play Store, as indicated by this VentureBeat report. The report added that WhatsApp was the second non-Google application to cross the milestone (the first being Facebook). Other applications which have crossed one billion downloads on Google Play are Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail.
In April, Koum claimed that the service had hit more than 800 million monthly active users. and in January this year, WhatsApp claimed that its users were sending over 30 billion messages everyday. Meanwhile, WhatsApp parent Facebook reported a mobile daily active user base of 844 million and a mobile monthly active user base of 1.31 billion for the quarter ended June 30.
In November, WhatsApp claimed to have reached 70 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India and at the time the company had said that India was its largest market. Last month, Whatsapp also included Urdu and Bengali language support in their latest support.
iOS gets voice calling, photo sharing etc via other apps
WhatsApp also introduced voice calling in iOS in April, as indicated by this report by The Verge. The feature will be added to the iOS app through an app update. At the time, WhatsApp said it would be rolling the feature out to all iOS users “slowly over the next few weeks”. It also mentioned that users could share photos, videos, links and other stuff to WhatsApp using the share button in other apps.
Sharing via Kindle app
In June, Amazon’s Kindle application made book quotes, recommendations, and highlights shareable on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for Android devices. The updated sharing buttons will be coming to Kindle e-readers and other operating systems later this year, the company said in a release.
