WhatsApp’s user-base has now been increased to 600 million, as the Facebook-owned chatapp stroms ahead of LINE and WeChat as the most popular chat app in the world.
The news was announced by CEO and founder Jan Koum, who tweeted that the popular messaging app was growing fast.
By comparison, WhatsApp had 200 million users in August 2013. By January 2014, the number surged to 430 million, and in April , it was announced that WhatsApp had 500 million active users.
Now serving 600,000,000 monthly active users. Yes, active and registered are very different types of numbers…
— jan koum (@jankoum) August 25, 2014
As indicated in his tweet, Koum is pointing out that rival messaging services often use registered users as a benchmark– a number that’s much higher than “active users,” since many people download apps and never use them.
When it comes to active users, WhatsApp is the most globally popular messaging app, followed by China’s WeChat and Japan’s LINE. WeChat has 438 million active users, and while it has ambitions to spread to the U.S. it has struggled to find a large base outside of Asia.
WhatsApp in return has yet to become big in China, Japan or South Korea, which are dominated by their own domestic services, but it’s huge in Europe.
The app can be found on nearly all smartphones in Spain and Hong Kong, according to the company’s own figures, and is regularly used by half the population of the Netherlands.