WhatsApp most popular messaging app in 109 countries

Apparently, more than half of the countries that use messaging apps use WhatsApp. At least that’s the result of a study conducted by Digital Vision wherein they analyzed Android data from 187 countries. That’s 55.6% of the world that use the messaging app, with Facebook’s Messenger a far second. The dominance of the Chinese app is obvious if you look at the map color-coding the whole world as to which app each country uses the most, and you’ll see that it’s a green world after all.

Countries like Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico, plus a lot of countries in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa are green for WhatsApp. They are number one in 109 countries while second placer Messenger, the now stand-alone messaging app from Facebook had only 49. It was dominant in Australia, Canada, and the US. The third most popular is Viber, but it’s only dominant in around 10 countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, including Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine, but also in other Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Libya.

In Japan, obviously, LINE is the most popular and people over there are using it at an average of more than 40 minutes every day. WeChat is still the messaging app of choice in China, and with the sheer number of users in the country, it can claim numbers that would be the envy of all other apps in this list. Other apps that are in the study include Telegram, KakaoTalk (South Korea), Imo (Cuba), Zalo (Vietnam), ChatOn (Eritrea), and BBM (Indonesia).

If you’re surprised to see BBM in the list, yes there are still people out there who use the messaging app from Blackberry, either for nostalgic or legacy purposes, or that they just really like the UI and features of the app. In fact, in Indonesia where it is king, 87.5% of all Android users there have it installed in their devices.

SOURCE: Digital Vision