Facebook Messenger has been able to come to the number one position in terms of growth in User headcount.
If you compare the current strength of WhatsApp that is about 900 million users to what Facebook Messenger now has, then you will see that the 100 million users that are less in the messenger is not too bad as compared to what the gap was in 2014. The number of users is still less than WhatsApp, but considering the number of features that the application is going to bring to the users, the number is bound to increase very soon.
So what was the reason for Facebook to show more growth as compared to what other apps did?
Facebook as compared to WhatsApp brought about a lot of changes. It brought about a change in the interface and made chats even better. Apart from simple interface changes, some major changes were also introduced. The application allowed users to book UBER rides through the Messenger. This feature was introduced after Facebook worked closely with UBER technologies for quite some time. The messenger also allowed US users to send money to their friends also living in the US.
This is not the only big change that Facebook will be restricted to. In future, Facebook will introduce a new digital assistant called M, which will help users to use it like they use Siri, Cortana or Google Now. It will also continue to make ads even more relevant so that in future users can make purchases from the messenger directly.
On the contrary, WhatsApp, which is also a Facebook owned app and continues to have the record of having the highest number of active users till date, has not been able to come up with too many changes. It came up with one major change, that is it introduced WhatsApp Calls, but on the whole the response has been low because nothing more was brought about. Perhaps the growth rate would rise if WhatsApp brought video calling, but it couldn’t make it in 2015.