WhatsApp Now Has 20 Crore Active Users In India, And Counting

About 20 crore people in India actively use WhatsApp in a month, the mobile messaging service has announced.

The announcement came as Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, along with Neeraj Arora, head of business, WhatsApp, on Friday visited Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi to interact with the students. They discussed how WhatsApp can contribute to India as it is focused on building a high utility service for millions of Indians, the company said.

In line with this, WhatsApp has been rolling out updates and features to make the app more secure for its users. Updates include the new ‘status’ feature that lets users share photos, GIFs or videos overlaid with drawings, emojis and a caption that will be visible to select friends for 24 hours, before disappearing.

Users can also see who has viewed their status update by tapping the eye icon at the bottom of any status update. The new feature is now available to all users across the globe on iPhone, Android and Windows devices.

This also means that WhatsApp has many more users in India than Facebook or Twitter. Given that, it has become an important platform for communication, and even campaigns.

Secondly, given India’s population, the country is still in its early stages of getting digitised. In the time to come, many more crores of Indians are likely to get on to WhatsApp. It would be interesting to observe then that what innovative ideas are born out of a platform, which would have so many Indians on it.