WhatsApp Passes SMS in Messages Per Day

Benedict Evans:

Noted this week: WhatsApp reported that it now has 700m MAUs sending 30bn messages a day. For comparison, the global SMS system sees about 20bn messages a day.

Big numbers to be sure, but a year ago Tim Cook claimed Apple was then handling 40 billion iMessages notifications and “15 to 20 million FaceTime calls” per day (note those B’s and M’s — it’s terribly easy to conflate millions and billions in English). Those numbers must be bigger by now. Here’s hoping that it comes up again on Apple’s next quarterly analyst call.

Update: “40 billion” was the daily number for all push notifications, not iMessage texts. Cook was only as specific as “several billion” for the number of those that are iMessage texts.

★ Monday, 12 January 2015