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Business News/ Tech-news / News/  WhatsApp hits 100 million voice calls per day
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WhatsApp hits 100 million voice calls per day

WhatsApp's ease of use, ubiquitousness and mobile-centric approach make it ideal to use

The company rolled out WhatsApp Calling to Android and iOs only in April 2015. Photo: BloombergPremium
The company rolled out WhatsApp Calling to Android and iOs only in April 2015. Photo: Bloomberg

WhatsApp Inc. announced in a blog post on Thursday (read here) that 100 million voice calls are made every day on its messaging app everyday, that’s over 1,100 calls a second! No mean feat, considering that the company rolled out WhatsApp Calling to Android and iOs only in April 2015.

Celebrating this big step, Jan Koum, chief executive officer and co-founder of WhatsApp, wrote on his Facebook page: “When I first moved to the USA, making a phone call to friends and family that I left in Ukraine was a frustrating process. You had to pick up a phone that was connected to a wall and hope that the person you were calling was near their phone on the other end. Years later, mobile phones began to make this a bit easier, but switching SIM cards and worrying about your mobile plan still made it challenging to call home. Since the early days of WhatsApp, we’ve worked to tear down the boundaries that stand between people staying in touch with their friends and family. A little over a year ago, we made it possible to make calls using WhatsApp—for those times when it’s important to hear a voice on the other end of your phone. Today, we’re proud that people are making 100 million calls a day on WhatsApp!"

Ever since WhatsApp introduced calling in April 2015 via its app, voice calls have become increasingly popular because the service enables users to make calls for free using the phone’s Internet connection rather than using expensive data. And while there are other data-calling services like Microsoft’s Skype, WhatsApp’s ease of use, ubiquitousness and mobile-centric approach make it ideal to use. In comparison, Skype users are more likely to use the app on their computers.

According to the last reported figures, Skype only has about 300 million active users per month. While this makes it a fairly large communication network, it is no patch on Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Facebook’s Messenger, for example, which can both make voice over IP (VOIP) calls and have more than a billion users. It would, thus, not be wrong to assume then that WhatsApp has already surpassed the number of daily Skype calls. Facebook-owned WhatsApp currently has 1 billion monthly active users on its mobile messaging platform that share 42 billion messages, 1.6 billion photos and 250 million videos daily on WhatsApp. And now make 100 million calls per day.

This also highlights the fact that people are moving away from traditional phone calls and are gravitating towards messaging apps for calling, particularly WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

WhatsApp really hit it big when Facebook purchased the messaging app in 2014 for about $19.3 billion. At the time, it only had 450 million monthly active users but today under the direction of Mark Zuckerberg and company, it has more than doubled this number.

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Published: 24 Jun 2016, 11:43 AM IST
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