Whatsapp now has as many users as Gmail. Goodbye, email.

One thing people won’t miss about email: spam. Image credit: Pixabay.

Whatsapp just hit a billion monthly active users this morning. It’s a big deal for Facebook, because that means it owns the top two messaging apps in the world by user count.

But the news is meaningful in another way. Whatsapp now has as many users as Gmail, the most-used email service ever. In other words, mobile chat is now as popular as, or more popular than, email.

Whatsapp’s fast rise to the top is remarkable considering it started from nothing in 2009. Gmail already had 150 million users then.

The story doesn’t end there. Other chat apps like WeChat and Line are getting staggering user figures, and they’re making tons of money as they suck up more of their users’ time.

Sure, business chat apps like Slack and Flowdock are still in their infancy, but companies are increasingly using them for internal correspondences. Whatsapp is also being used for such a purpose.

While communication between companies is still mostly done through email, chat apps are more than capable of handling that, as Japan’s ChatWork shows.

Email seems destined for relegation to the museum, as text chat is being used for a rising number of things, from customer service to product updates to buying things.

Gmail grew in spite of mobile chat’s rise because it adapted to the rise of smartphones by developing mobile versions of its service.

But its growth is likely to peter out soon. There was only so much the horse carriage could be reinvented before the car took its place.