WhatsApp Amassed 400 Million Users In India

WhatsApp’s number of users in Indian has reached 400 million, a figure that, once again, confirms its popularity in the country.

This news was revealed by Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog, at a conference organized by WhatsApp on Thursday in New Delhi. This stat was later reaffirmed by a spokesperson of the instant messaging app.

This achievement comes two years after WhatsApp announced that it had over 2 million users in Indian. However, the company did not reveal the stat for India in between the two time marks.

400 million active users, meaning that the app is used by every person who has a smartphone, is a proof for the dominance of Facebook in the country. Counterpoint, a research firm, said that India had around 450 million smartphone users; some other companies claim that the figure is lower.

The fact that WhatsApp supports KaiOS, the operating system for feature handsets, is one of the reasons for its domination in India. Millions of JioPhone that comes equipped with this OS have been sold in the country. It is also worth pointing out that India has over 500 million Internet users, as per the estimates of many industry experts.

As WhatsApp’s popularity is increasing fast, the app is changing itself to meet more of the user’s needs. Meesho, a social-commerce app was built on the instant messaging platform, recently become the first of this kind of investment in India. However, the platform was also used to spread fake news and fuel violence, which has caused it lots of trouble.

WhatsApp might be the dominant app right now, but it has been in fierce competition with ByteDance’ TikTok and the like. With over 120 million users, the app for sharing short videos is projected to be Facebook’s strongest competitor.

According to a spokesperson of WhatsApp, India is the company’s biggest market. Back in 2017, 250 million Indian users used Facebook’s service, but this stat has not been updated for quite some time.

TikTok has the potential to dethrone the Facebook-owned instant messaging app, but that is the matter only time can answer, for now, with more than 1.5 billion active users in India, WhatsApp does not exactly have a rival in India. The closest thing to a competitor now is Messenger and Hike. What WhatsApp achieves is nearly as much as Times Internet, a conglomerate in India that has various entertainment services and news outlets.

At the same conference where its number of monthly users was revealed, Will Cathcart, WhatsApp’s global chief said that the company was about to launch WhatsApp Pay, its own payment service later this year.

The arrival of this payment service is crucial for Facebook and a threat to PhonePe, Paytm, and Google Pay. As Facebook has no plan to roll out Libra, its cryptocurrency in India in the near future, WhatsApp Pay might be its tool to secure a place in this market in India.

Other announcements made this week are WhatsApp’s collaboration with NITI Aayog to encourage women’s entrepreneurship, and cooperation with the Indian School of Public Policy, to offer privacy design workshops to students.