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.
