Last November WhatsApp announced it had surpassed 1 billion messages sent per day. This morning the app announced another massive milestone on twitter: 10 billion messages sent per day:
new daily record: 4B inbound, 6B outbound = 10B total messages a day! #freebsd #erlang
— WhatsApp Inc. (@WhatsApp) August 23, 2012
Back in June, WhatsApp explained why their app isn’t free:
When we sat down to start our own thing together three years ago we wanted to make something that wasn’t just another ad clearinghouse. We wanted to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.
Back in April, WhatsApp noted they did not see themselves as a threat to SMS, but rather they see themselves helping carriers sell data plans. In January of 2010, we worked exclusively with WhatsApp to help them troubleshoot an error for Rogers/Fido users, where connections would fail over the 3G network.
Periodically, WhatsApp will unleash itself as a free download, which happened recently near the end of July. So if you can’t spare $1, wait for the next surprise freebie offering.
At $0.99, WhatsApp is by far one of the best bargains on the App Store. Its cross platform extends to iOS, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone, Nokia Symbian and Nokia S40. This had made it emerge as the premier carrier texting alternative, but of course it does rely on a data connection.
How often do you use WhatsApp? It’s still one of my favourite alternatives for chatting with friends that aren’t on iOS, or when there’s an issue with iMessage.
[via BGR]
