Facebook's WhatsApp crosses 500 mn users; 48 mn in India

Popular messaging app WhatsApp has claimed 500 million plus users. The company that had been bought by Facebook in February this year for $19 billion had been steadily adding to its growing list of users (See: Facebook to buy smartphone-messaging app WhatsApp for a staggering $16 bn).

WhatsApp had a user base of 200 million in August last year, while the number doubled to 430 million in January 2014. The instant messaging app had also revealed that it processed 50 billion messages on an average every day.

Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp said in a post on company's blog, ''In the last few months, we've grown fastest in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, and our users are also sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day.''

The post clarified further that these 500 million people were not only registered members but also active users. According to commentators, the new milestone for the messaging app explained why Mark Zuckerberg was interested in buying it.

As far as India was concerned, the app remained one of the fastest growing markets for WhatsApp and the company's Neeraj Arora who spoke to BGR India claimed it was adding a whopping 4 million active users per month and the India user base was set to cross the 50 million mark in May, constituting 10 per cent of all users. According to the report, currently the service had 48 million active users in the country.

Meanwhile the WhatsApp Facebook deal had come under scrutiny for privacy issues and one of the main reasons users were worried about the acquisition was they fear WhatsApp could lose its ad-free messaging service.

The recent WhatsApp outages had only added to the fear that the ad-free service would no longer remain that way.

However, Jan Koum reassured users in an official statement that read, ''WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can continue to enjoy the service for a nominal fee. You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you're using. And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication.''

Meanwhile, the app seemed to be well on track to achieve the billion users mark as Mark Zuckerberg expects.