Facebook Messenger reaches the billion users mark

Mark Zuckerburg has added another feather to his cap, with Facebook Messenger reaching the one billion users mark to become one of the most popular chat apps in the world.

It now joins WhatsApp, which leads the instant messaging category with more than 1.2 billion users worldwide. Messenger has now joined its parent company Facebook with WhatsApp to establish the giant’s dominance over the top three most popular apps in the world.

Facebook has announced a new celebratory emoji in the form of a balloon for users to send to each other.

Since, its launch in 2011 the app has been growing steadily, especially after being removed from the core Facebook app, forcing users to download the app separately.

According to the statistics given by Facebook, Messenger is the second most popular iOS app, while the Android version has been downloaded over 1 billion times; 17 billion photos are sent on Messenger each month and 1 billion messages pass between people and businesses. Further 380 million stickers and 22 million GIFs are sent every day and Messenger now has a 10% global market share of VOIP calls.

Considering the number of updates and features it has received over time, such as video calling, end-to-end encryption, and support for Instant Articles among others, Facebook has transformed Messenger into a giant albeit by forcing it upon users.

Boosting communication between businesses and consumers, Facebook had recently launched bots for the Messenger platform in order to ease interaction. There are around 11,000 chat bots on the platform.

Facebook owned photo sharing platform, Instagram too had reached a milestone of 500 million users this year which makes Facebook the indisputable king of social media.