After
announcing 500 million active WhatsApp users in April, latest figures
claim that the number of active users have now increased to 600 million.
This piece of news comes from WhatsApp CEO and founder Jan Koum who
made the announcement on Twitter.
Last
year in August, WhatsApp had 200 million users while the number doubled
to 430 million in January 2014. The instant messaging space has been
growing by leaps and bounds. Some of its competitors include WeChat,
Facebook Messenger, Line and Hike.
Recently,
Facebook announced to pull out the messaging feature from its mobile
apps, forcing people to download its standalone Messenger apps.
Needless to say, Facebook has bought WhatsApp for a whopping $19
billion earlier this year. In a bid to woo users, WeChat has started
offering 1GB cloud storage free to help them store documents, pictures
and videos. WeChat, which launched its operations in India in 2012, has
over 100 million registered accounts internationally. The messaging
application was the second most downloaded application on iOS in India
in 2013. The report earlier this month claimed that WeChat is inching
closer to WhatsApp with 438 million monthly active users.
With
the growing use of messaging apps in India has hurt been hurting
telcos. Indian telecom companies have been quite vocal about their
dislike for over-the-top (OTT) services such as WhatsApp, Viber and the
likes. Last month there was a buzz around TRAI implementing fees on such
app, but the most recent report claim TRAI has rejected telcos’
proposal to charge fee on popular services like WhatsApp, Skype and
others.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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