With the availability of cross-platform messaging apps, it seems many are looking towards those as opposed to sending messages through a carrier provided plan. One of those messaging apps is WhatsApp and it looks like they have recently set a new daily record. The company took to their official Twitter account and shared the news of having handled 27 billion messages in a 24 hour time period.
The breakdown includes 17 billion messages as being received (outbound) and 10 billion as having been sent (inbound). This news comes as a decent step as compared to a report from April. In April, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum talked about how they were seeing a combined 20 billion messages per day. This was coming from more than 200 million monthly active users.
At the time of the April (20 billion) number, Koum had that broken down as being 12 billion outbound and 8 billion inbound. WhatsApp currently has an Android app available as well as apps for other platforms to include iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. The app is free for Android users. In addition, the first year of service is also free. After the first year however there will be a $0.99 per year charge to keep things going.
To sum up the features, WhatsApp will allow you to send and receive individual messages and also participate in group chats. Users are able to send plain text messages as well as image, video and voice notes. The app is also setup to use data (cellular or WiFi) when available and can even hold messages for those times when you turn your phone off or miss a notification.
Of course, while WhatsApp is seeing an increase in usage, there are plenty of other alternatives available. Google recently released Hangouts and BlackBerry is even expected to join in on the cross-platform messaging market fairly soon. While we have yet to see a firm release date for BBM for Android, that is expected to arrive sooner rather than later. That said, whichever option you choose, it is nice to not have to worry about carrier messaging fees and limits.
VIA: SlashGear
I’m probably reading this wrong somehow but – WhatsApp being a completely self-contained messaging platform – how can the numbers of outbound vs. inbound messages not be symmetrical?
If you send to a group, you would get 1 outbound, many inbound.
That makes sense indeed. I don’t use group messaging in WhatsApp at all so this didn’t even occur to me. I must have been tired last night…
Guess Google should have bought them. The new hangouts app is currently much worse than Google Talk in many ways.
I wish Google would just buy them already.