Wow! Whatsapp now has 800 million active users

WhatsApp messaging app has become an undisputable force in the messaging arena and has been growing in popularity exponentially over the past few years. Jan Koum, CEO and co-founder of the mobile messenger, yesterday shared on his Facebook page that the product has reached yet another veritable milestone – 800 million monthly active users.

Last year August, this number was around 600 million and this years January – 700 million. At this incredible rate of about 25 million new active users per month, the service could very well exceed 1 billion, by the end of this year. This is a huge accomplishment and the exponential growth of WhatsApp has become even more impressive after Facebook paid a whooping $19 billion and acquired the platform under its wing in February 2014.

But, even though, the messaging giant was crowned “the most globally popular messaging app” after surpassing the 700 million mark,  Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO and founder still believes the service has a long way to go, before it competes with the rest of the Facebook ecosystem in terms of business maturity. In his own words:

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.

Zuckerberg also said that after the billion user mark, WhatsApp will finally start to truly contribute to Facebook’s business model. This statement is a bit surprising, considering Facebook has 1.4 billion active monthly users for its social platform, but only about 600 million active users for its messenger, so clearly, WhatsApp is still the top dog in this category.

The messenging app recently introduced voice calling functionality on both Android and iOS devices, allowing it to compete on even more market fronts. There are rumors now that the same functionality will be coming to Windows Phone devices pretty soon. The rumour is mostly based on a few allegedly leaked phrases, intended to make their way into the new version of the app on the said platform.