WhatsApp now has a user base of 450 million daily active users who use its Status feature, outperforming Snapchat that currently has a significantly lower monthly active user number of 191 million. At the Facebook’s annual F8 developers’ conference, WhatsApp director Mubarik Imam announced the new milestone achieved by the company. WhatsApp status is a redesigned version of the boring text status, which was introduced in February last year, taking on Snapchat.
Thanks to the much higher user base, WhatsApp Status has been a hit among the users, despite being copied from Snapchat Stories. Snapchat enjoys a base of 191 monthly active users who use the Stories feature, which is way too lower than what WhatsApp has gnawed from it. Imam also announced that WhatsApp will soon allow group video calling up to four people, as well as introduce stickers on the platform.
WhatsApp has been lately focusing on to make the chat groups better for the users. The new video calling feature for chat groups has been long awaited. On the other hand, the stickers on the platform are likely to replace the text replies for things as short as a ‘Thank you’ or ‘Cool’. WhatsApp is taking the inspiration for stickers from other major apps such as Facebook Messenger and rival apps including WeChat, Hike, and Line.
Parent company Facebook is also making changes to its privacy settings to allow users gain more control over their personal data. Facebook is working on a new tool called ‘Clear History’ that will let the users review their information shared by the apps and websites that use Facebook services such as login, Like button, and Comment plug-in. If the users want, they can delete everything that Facebook has stored through these websites.
