WhatsApp hits 800 million monthly users

Facebook truly dominate the social networking world and this week they are celebrating another huge milestone as their messaging platform hits 800 million active monthly users and it is predicted that the app will exceed one billion active monthly users by the end of the year.

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced via Facebook that they have now exceeded 800 million active monthly users.

Facebook acquired WhatsApp in a massive $19 billion deal back in October 2014 and since then it has consistently grown. Last August WhatsApp had 600 million active users increasing to 700 million back in January and now 800 million just 3 months later.

WhatsApp allows you to send messages for free via the internet and is now expanding to allow users to make phone calls for free. Their new service has been dubbed "the way that the world will make phone calls in the future". This service is already available on Android and will be launched on iOS and Windows phones within the next few weeks.

The app is also available on almost every mobile platform including iOS, Android, Windows and Blackberry devices.

WhatsApp is now one of the largest social services, exceeding monthly active of some of the most popular social networks such as Twitter (which has 288 million active monthly users) and LinkedIn (which has 187 million active monthly users). It even trumps Instagram, another company that is owned by Facebook, which was reported to have 300 million active monthly users. Yet all are still miles behind the social giant Facebook with over 1.39 billion monthly active users.

Despite WhatsApp being one of the most popular messaging apps, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg still thinks the service has a long way to go before it catches up with the rest of Facebooks ecosystem in terms of business maturity.

He said “What I’d say around messaging is we’re pretty early in that cycle… We are about where Facebook was in around 2006 or 2007, where, at that point, Facebook is really just a consumer product. There were no businesses in the ecosystem.”