Member Article

Why WhatsApp has Continued to Remain the Popular Messenger

If you ask any random smart phone user, whether he or she is in Whatsapp or not, you know what reply you will get from them??

But obvious, they will reply you in monosyllable: YES!!

Every single smart phone user, be it a school or college student, young adult or even your parents and, in some cases, your Grand Parents, are the active users of the popular messaging platform.

**So what do you know about the popular messenger named WhatsApp??? **

Every smart phone has this particular app installed in their device. It is a cross-platform, free to download instant messenger app currently owned by Facebook. Users of iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia etc. can easily exchange text, image, audio, and video messages amongst them for free as it runs on internet. The group chatting, video chatting, voice messages, location sharing and many other features make it the most sought after social media platform especially among teen and young adults.

Let us take a few steps back into the history of this messenger:

Whatsapp first came into existence in the year of 2009, initially as a messenger, offering a common platform to exchange text messages, the first of its kind. If we go back in the late 90s and early 20s, students and elders prefer texting to calling a person. Mobile phones gave that benefit to its users to save a few bucks by sending a text message rather than spending more in dialing their number.

Other popular social media messengers were already in the market. Skype and Facebook can be mentioned as few of the earlier entries. Skype came into existence in the year of 2003 and Facebook in the year of 2004.

However, Skype failed to beat the rising popularity of WhatsApp. Skype was more of a PC thing and excelled in voice and video calling, preferred by corporate for video/voice conference and online interviews. WhatsApp messenger, however, pushed Sms in cold storage. SMSs’ were not free of cost and were limited to sending only texts in limited characters. This messenger came as a blessing, especially for those young users, who preferred to send texts to their friends rather than taking the effort to call them up.

The rising popularity of WhatsApp compelled Facebook to purchase this messenger app for $ 19 Billion in the year of 2014.

Another social messenger that entered the market in the year of 2012 was Hike. This is an indigenous platform embedded with similar applications and features as that of WhatsApp. There is one added attribute of Hike which allows users to see and exchange offline messages. But it failed to beat its rival.

Now let me put forward the various reasons behind its continuous success as The Most Popular Chat App, though users are familiar with some of its attributes.

What are the many reasons behind the success of WhatsApp???

• The new model of identification recognized by this messenger identifies users’ through their contact numbers and anyone who has your phone number can catch you online.
• This is available on Multi-platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, Nokia and many others.
• Multiple devices for WhatsApp installation that allows you to access this messenger on your PC or Laptop by using WhatsApp web or by downloading.
• The most annoying in-app Advertisements have never been included in its framework.
• The Terms and conditions of Whatsapp specify that users have to be at least 16 years of age to use the service.
• Free of cost and instant messaging application.
• You can see which friend is online and also there is a last seen option that tells you when your contact was last active on WhatsApp.
• There is another trait that will hide your last seen option as well.
• You can create group with multiple admins, adding a maximum of 256 friends in a single group.
• Archive your chat history for future use.
• Broadcast message option allows you to send the same text to multiple receivers at the same time.
• Easy to share across any form of documents.
• Desktop application has been launched in 2016.
• Status update with images or videos as well.
• Easy sharing of your images from your phone gallery.
• Now you can call or even video call from your WhatsApp messenger.
• Stay in touch with any of your friend irrespective of his/her physical location and there is no need to spend extra bucks for International contacts.

Summing UpAll the social media platforms that have come up in the recent years have useful features and attributes. Which one will you choose depends entirely on your personal understanding. However, Facebook managed WhatsApp is undoubtedly fast advancing and gradually climbing the success ladder and has managed to retain its status as one of the popular messenger till date.

Current Statistics of WhatsApp:

• WhatsApp’s updated version 2.17.40, the app users will be able to watch YouTube videos in Picture-in-Picture mode without opening YouTube and is likely to work for iOS platform. However, it is still in the process stage.
• Current WhatsApp users stand at 1.2 billion users.
• Indians spent 50 million minutes every day on WhatsApp video chatting.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mary Smith .