Do you know which country happens to be the largest market for WhatsApp! Well, for starters, it is the most populous country in the world, i.e., China! And of course, one wonders, why would anything think that China would be the market for WhatsApp when the famous Communist regime is almost always gung-ho about WeChat?
Secondly, the largest market for WhatsApp also isn’t the United States, just to make things clear. If anyone wanted some sort of a clue then it ought to be said that the country that happens to be the largest market for WhatsApp doesn’t happen to be in Latin America, North America or Europe!
Perhaps, one must be closer to nailing down the final answer.
India, without a doubt, with a baffling population of 34 crore users- that’s more than the population of Sweden, Norway, Finland and perhaps, even Israel- is the largest market for WhatsApp.
And, in addition to the above, it’s also worthwhile to visit the industry reports that suggest that the growth of WhatsApp in the largest democracy of the world has been tremendous in the last few recent years.
But now that one knows about the intricate relation between India and WhatsApp, let’s try and figure the country with the second-largest number of WhatsApp users. Apparently, the gap between India and this country’s number of users is around 25 crore. Brazil is the answer.
A leading national business bulletin, read widely in India, happened to share some interesting highlights about the popularity of WhatsApp:
The Facebook-owned WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world, has been posting rapid gains in popularity in India in the last few years. The data revolution unleashed by Reliance Jio has resulted in a rapid rise in the number of internet users in the country. India has about 50 crore smartphones users and it is estimated that about 68% of them use WhatsApp. Reliance Jio’s immensely popular feature phones came with WhatsApp pre-installed. It is reported that WhatsApp may soon launch WhatsApp payment service India. The tool is still in the testing phase.
But the above told, what’s important is to note that wherever WhatsApp might be in terms of its current growth in India, it’s popularity didn’t transpire in some ‘blink and you see it‘ moment.
It took a long time for one of the world’s most widely used social media messaging apps to grow in terms of its popularity in the country owing to the growing menace of Fake News.
And recently, if there’s been a factor that’s importatly pushed the attention toward an increasing usage of the popular app, then it all boils down to the introduction of new features.
WhatsApp has been introducing new features for its users around the world. Recently, the platform launched a new feature that allows users to listen to audio without having to open the lock screen. However, this feature is only available for iOS users at the moment. Earlier, they had also released a fingerprint lock feature on the Android version of the application. The feature was first released for the iOS platform in February. It allows users to unlock WhatsApp using FaceID or Touch ID on iPhone.