Gone are the days when Skype was basically the default program on people’s computers for making free long-distance calls. With messaging apps becoming increasingly popular among smartphone users worldwide, most such apps have now incorporated voice and video calling to their repertoire, giving users a huge amount of choice about how to communicate with their friends and family. WhatsApp, the ubiquitous messaging app that was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion back in 2014, is one of the most prominent players in the segment. The app is the market leader in many countries around the world and is used by millions of people for messaging, voice calling and video chatting.
The app is believed to have over 1 billion monthly active users, having passed the landmark earlier in the year. Now the company has announced that it has crossed yet another important milestone in terms of the sheer volume of voice calls it is handling globally. According to an official announcement from the Mountain View, California-based WhatsApp Inc., its messaging app handles over 100 million voice calls on a daily basis. While that’s a staggering number either way one looks at it, what’s even more impressive is that the company continues to lead the market by a wide margin in spite of having lagged behind most of its peers like Skype, Viber, Line and a whole host of other such apps that had been offering VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services for much longer.
While most of its competitors had introduced voice and video calling to their messaging platforms far earlier than WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned company only managed to roll out the feature to all users in the middle of last year. What’s interesting is that the stable version of WhatsApp available from Google Play doesn’t come with support for video calling even now, although most of its aforementioned competitors have been offering the feature for some time now. Microsoft-owned Skype, meanwhile, has over 300 million monthly active users, but the company does not give out stats about its average daily usage unlike the Facebook-owned company. With messaging apps becoming more popular by the day because of all the benefits they offer over traditional voice and video calling, it isn’t really a surprise that their usage is currently at an all-time high.