WhatsApp now has half a billion active users: CEO Koum lays out future plans

WhatsApp, the popular messaging app that Facebook bought for $19 billion, has crossed 500 million users. Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp says 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 states that 500 million people are not only registered members but also active users. For a company that had only 200 million users in August 2013, this is massive growth. In Jan 2014 WhatsApp had crossed 430 million and 4 months later it has hit the 500 million mark, half-way short of the second one billion users that Zuckerberg wants  to get. Where India is concerned, the app has close to 48 million users and will cross the 50 million mark in India this May.

So what does this growth mean for WhatsApp? According to Koum, for now it’s about bug fixes .  “We’re going to get our engineers together and fix a lot of bugs. 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 told Recode.

As far as user engagement is concerned, WhatsApp has little to worry about; 70 percent of users are active on the app on a given day. More importantly the app is free, and will remain ad free for the foreseeable future, which is one of the reasons why it is so popular.

For Koum, the decision to focus on the product is fine, but the pressure to grow is not going to stop with 500 million users. India is one of the biggest markets and even though it has hit the 50 million mark, the aim will be to continue growing stronger. And given the numbers of apps  that are coming up and gaining users, India is a tough market to crack.

From Hike to Line to WeChat, WhatsApp faces serious competition in India. Line, which is Japan-based app with ‘Stickers’ as the USP has close to 17 million users in India. Hike, an app started by Bharti Airtel, has close to 15 million users.

The biggest rival to WhatsApp is WeChat which is based in China. The app is available in India but the number of users in India is not clear. WeChat hasn’t given out number specifics but it says it has 100 million users outside of China and it is expected to cross 450 million users worldwide this year. In fact, according to this report on TechCrunch , WeChat could be worth $ 60 billion.

So the competition list isn’t small for WhatsApp and the audience is picky. One only needs to remember the outrage that occurred when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook thanks to which Telegram, a relatively unknown messaging app, saw 5 million downloads in a day. Telegram has crossed 35 million users  since then and is seeing 8 billion messages exchanged on the app everyday.

For WhatsApp to continue growth, the worry will be to get new users, especially teens, who might feel that the app is more conventional than its rivals and would want to try something new. And given that China, which is the world’s largest smartphone market prefers WeChat, WhatsApp has its task cut out. The first half a billion are here, but whether WhatsApp has enough to attract another 500 million is still up in the air.