WhatsApp Handles 30B Messages Everyday. 50% Higher Than Global SMS Volume!

The decline in the messaging technology has been quite evident since the advent of messenger applications. Since 2011, the messaging figures have been prominently declining according to the figures from Ofcom. WhatsApp is now used to deliver 50% more messages each day than the traditional SMS service.

Jan Koum, CEO of WhatsApp announced record results last week, he also demonstrated the continued growth of the application. The company is now handling 30 billion messages every day, compared to the 20 billion SMS sent daily. WhatsApp now has to its booty 700 million monthly active users and processes 347,222 messages every second, thus further widening the sizeable gap between WhatsApp and texting.

Here is WhatsApp’s meteoric rise since April 2013.

Via: Statista

“As humbled and excited as we are by these numbers and our continued growth, we’re even more excited to keep building a great product in 2015,” wrote Koum on his Facebook Page. “Most of all, we’re grateful that so many of you are using WhatsApp to stay in touch with your friends and family, business colleagues and classmates. We promise to continue working hard to make WhatsApp even better.”

Ofcom data reveals that the SMS is heading in the other direction, seeing an 8.7% drop in messages sent in 2013. Despite the exponential growth of the WhatsApp platform, one cannot ignore its elite competitors. Although it remains the world’s largest instant messaging app, it has a competitor in Facebook Messenger as the latter has approximately 500 million users. However, given that WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, both of them merging together in future cannot be ruled out!

WhatsApp’s other competitor, WeChat, is also a big hit in the Chinese and Asian markets. The competitors of WhatsApp are thus seen to be popular particularly in certain geographic locations. Apple has not revealed the user numbers of iMessage service, so it cannot be compared to any of the others. With over 400 millions iPhones, its hard to predict how big it is.

And then there are others like Viber, Line, Hike and others who are steadily adding new users to their messaging platform.

SMS is in its last leg!

The mobile messaging apps have a clear victory over the humble SMS as smartphones are social platforms in themselves. Mobile applications can access your address book, bypassing the need to rebuild your social graph on a new service. They also have an access pass to the photo and video libraries and can also use push notifications from endless numbers of websites. Most importantly, they’re all lying on the home screen. All these factors, which SMS and MMS can live upto, but slowly and at an additional cost, are beating the service.

In analysis about the other social networks which are taking attention away from the SMS services, Benedict Evans, an analyst for VC firm Andreessen Horowitz said, “Talking about winners per se seems like it may be the wrong conversation – people use several of these at once for different purposes. WhatsApp may win ‘text chat’ but that’s not quite what Instagram is about. After all, your smartphone comes with three social networks out of the box, voice, SMS and email, and you use them all. Are you really going to add only one more? So something else may displace WhatsApp in the UK or India for text chat, but it’s more likely that there will be more Snapchats that carve out a slice of time by doing something different.”

While WhatsApp is currently coming out on top in the mobile messaging space, the industry insiders predict room for continued big thing innovations, which are hard to predict.