11-year-old WhatsApp Now has 2 Billion Users

Yes, you read it right, Facebook-owned WhatsApp, the interactive messaging app now has a whopping two-billion active users, globally. The company had 1.5 billion users prior to this new achievement. The messaging platform was founded exactly 11-years ago by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo. And, six years ago i.e in 2014, social media giant, Facebook has acquired the messaging service for $19 Billion, which had been the biggest acquisition by that date. WhatsApp, which was first introduced as a paid service with the annual subscription had been made free from 2016.

Despite WhatsApp being criticized for its privacy and encryption after the Facebook acquisition and also with other competition like Signal and Telegram, WhatsApp has still managed to bring a massive two-billion users to its service, which is incredible. In its recent blog post, WhatsApp had made its announcement suggesting the achievement of Two Billion Users. The platform that started as a messaging service through chats – had later introduced audio and video chatting capabilities as well.

In its blog post, the messaging platform had also suggested their focus on its chats and its privacy. The company had claimed that every message on the chats on its service is a private message, which is secured and end-to-end encrypted by default. The messaging platform also suggests all the messages on the service are only kept on the phone and no one can further read the respective messages not even the company itself and the same happens to be applied for voice calls and video calls as well. Recent reports have also suggested WhatsApp is soon going to bring the much anticipated Dark Mode feature — thanks to Android 10 and iOS 13.

WhatsApp is currently available for Android and iOS platforms and the company also provides respective individual apps for Windows and Mac operating systems as well. Additionally, WhatsApp can also be accessed anywhere through its WhatsApp Web client through any secured browser. WhatsApp had announced its WhatsApp Payment feature in India as well. The ease of using the messaging service, which replaced Texts/SMS in many countries and regions has encouraged around two billion users to get on the platform, which is certainly an astounding achievement.