The year that has just begun seems to confirm the unstoppable success of WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned instant messaging app that in 2016 was able to reach the incredible amount of 1 billion monthly active users. And to confirm the positive trend, the company has revealed the last impressive result: during New Year’s Eve 63 billion WhatsApp messages were sent globally. Isn’t it incredible?
Obviously, this is a record for our beloved instant messaging app, considering that only in India the messages sent were 14 billion. Surprised by these numbers? Let’s see how it was possible to reach this result according to the statement released by WhatsApp itself to Venture Beat.
As we said, of the total of the 63 billion messages 7.9 billion were images and 2.4 billion videos. In India, where WhatsApp messages sent have been 14 billion, the 32% of users sent media messages such as GIF images, videos, voice messages and photos. 3.1 billion of images have been shared between Indian users, along with 700 million GIF images and 610 million videos.
We can easily say that the incredible success of WhatsApp during the last Christmas holidays was possible also thanks to the recent updates added to the app during the last few months. We are talking about the ability to share animated GIF images, just to give you an example. Or also the ability to stream shared videos, which enables users to view videos before they were downloaded. Not to mention the new and much awaited Video Calling feature.
The New Year’s Eve meant also the end of an era. If you are a WhatsApper you know that we are talking about the end of WhatsApp support on older versions of Android, iOS and Windows Phone. So, starting from the 1st of January 2017, WhatsApp won’t work anymore on devices running on Android 2.2 or lower, iOS 6 or lower, and Windows Phone 7.