Nivedita Bhattacharjee · · 1 min readIndia sent 14b Whatsapp messages on New Year’s Eve, smashing records
Whatsapp is the most popular messaging service in India. Photo credit: 2nix / 123RF.
Fourteen billion Whatsapp messages were exchanged in India on New Year’s Eve, making it an all-time high from the country, the firm said on Friday.
Not just that, 32 percent of those messages were in the form of some sort of media: Whatsapp’s 160 million monthly active Indian users sent 3.1 billion images, 700 million GIFs, and 610 million videos.
Facebook-owned Whatsapp has made SMS in India all but redundant. Farmers to school students to businessmen use the service to communicate. Many in India use the English script to communicate in various Indian languages, so language is no barrier. Whatsapp also has local language support in the country.
WhatsApp says it has optimized its features to handle the low-bandwidth internet connectivity and cheap phones used in most parts of India. “We’re obsessed with making sure that voice and video work well even on low-end phones,” Jan Koum said in November, when it launched video calling services in the country.
Editing by Steven Millward and Neha Margosa
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