Whatsapp hits 2 billion global users, remains Africa’s largest messaging App

Instant messaging platform, Whatsapp, has recorded an addition of 500 million new users in 2 years, raising its bar to 2 billion users.

While Whatsapp becomes the second App to do so, it remains Africa’s largest messaging App and seems to be growing rapidly with a potential to soon exceed its parent company Facebook which currently has 2.5 billion users.

No doubt, “whatsapp fever” in recent years has been observed across board as more users sign up to own an account to message friends and families, especially in cases where distance has become a challenge.

A good example of this is when relatives are on foreign trips. Whatsapp has remained and thrived as a pretty much cheaper medium to stay connected on the go, without the need to roam before use or pay extra charges on instant messages especially.

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Its video call feature and conference call as equally earned users recommendations, listing it as an on-the-go app for all.

Concerns, however, would be on the safety measures put in place by the platform to ensure users’ privacy and confidential conversations are secured.

This becomes more important since Whatsapp and Facebook are family platforms under a single ownership.

Hence, with worrisome feeds and allegations on Facebook breaching its data and outrightly trading some off, Whatsapp may have to keep building trust by intensifying its security and staying true to its promises.

The platform though, while reacting to this fright from analysts, has noted that the company is aware of such fear and is doing everything possible not to betray and breach trust.

The company on its blog published thus: “We know that the more we connect, the more we have to protect. As we conduct more of our lives online, protecting our conversations is more important than ever. Every private message sent using WhatsApp is secured with end-to-end encryption by default.”

Mark Zuckerberg is no doubt investing so much to keep scaling. It’s, therefore, not surprising to see how it is fast doubling the figures of its user base as compared to the Twitter pace.

With 2 billion on Whatsapp and 2.5 billion on Facebook, Twitter’s nearly 400 million users speaks volume of the Zuckerberg success, building platforms to connect and share documents.

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