Half a billion people around the world officially use WhatsApp every single month. The incredibly popular messaging service made the announcement on its blog on Tuesday April 22. The app's 500 million users send 700 million photos and 100 million videos every day, according to WhatsApp.
Back in February, when Facebook declared its intentions toward WhatsApp, the messaging service had 450 million monthly active users. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp for $19 billion, many thought that he had overpaid. Zuckerberg disagreed, based largely on the projected growth of WhatsApp's user base.
It seems he was right to bet big on WhatsApp. It added the next 50 million in just a few months' time. In order to reach the next big milestone and eventually, one billion users, WhatsApp will have to stand the test of time and keep delivering what its users want: quality service.
"We're going to get our engineers together and fix a lot of bugs," said WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum. "We don't have anything huge we've changed in our last six months, but we've had probably 1,000 little bug fixes and improvements," he added.
Koum said for the most part, he doesn't plan on making any grand alterations to WhatsApp in the near future. After all, why fix what isn't broken?
"I worry about how to offer a competitive set of features without making the UI difficult, the user experience worse, the application bloated," he said. "These screens are small. There's a limited amount of memory and bandwidth. It's just all about focus."
Koum wants to focus in on the user experience and keep WhatsApp cool. To do so, the app must maintain its beautiful simplicity and simple functionality. So long as Facebook lets WhatsApp do its thing, the next 500 million users won't be too far away from WhatsApp's grasp.
