Mobile messaging app WhatsApp says it processed more than 10 billion messages in one day this week. That’s more than one message for every person on earth. On one app.
WhatsApp is an alternative to texting that uses mobile data rather than SMS. It enables group chats, photo sharing and video sharing, and is available for iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry devices.
The company tweeted its milestone on Thursday: “new daily record: 4B inbound, 6B outbound = 10B total messages a day! #freebsd #erlang.” The hashtags are references to the technology behind WhatsApp: the app was developed largely on the open source platform FreeBSD using the Erland programming language originally written by Ericsson.
The other potentially confusing part of the announcement is the fact that there were 2 billion more outbound messages than inbound messages. The company says that’s because of the group chat feature – a user can send one message to several people.
India may be the source of billions of WhatsApp messages. The government recently restricted citizens to five SMS messages per day, giving a huge boost to mobile messaging services like WhatsApp.
The founders of WhatsApp are Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both veterans of Yahoo. The company has reportedly raised $8 million from Sequoia Capital, and is generating revenue from users who pay $2.00 a year to use WhatsApp. The app is free for the first year and then converts to a paid app, except on the iPhone. iPhone users pay a buck a year, right from the start.
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