Facebook messenger has joined the elite club of apps which has more than a billion active users. On Wednesday, the company announced in a blog post that it has joined the three comma club in terms of active users.
Earlier this year during the Facebook developer conference F8 CEO Mark Zuckerberg had announced that the messaging platform now has more than 900 million active users per month.
It seems that within 5 months it has added 100 million active users. This is a huge number considering a social network such as twitter has managed to add just under 5 million users over a period of a year.
The social network had released the app first in 2011 for iOS and Android. Later, it removed the chat functionality from the mobile website and the Facebook app in 2014. Forcing people to download the messenger app to chat.
Although this move faced a lot of backlash from the users, eventually people accepted the platform as it started providing features such as video and audio calling, stickers, payments, and more.
During the F8 conference, the company also announced that Facebook messenger will now support chatbots. For Instance, a user can chat with an Uber bot to call a cab, or a McDonalds bot to order a happy meal. Facebook opened the Bot API for the developers to build different applications.
Messenger has been adding a bunch of features this year. After chatbots, it introduced group calling for 50 people. It has also added end-to-end encryption to the platform which is going to be rolled out very soon.
WhatsApp was one of the first chat apps who made their chats and calls fully encrypted this year. This suit was later followed by Viber as well.