WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app – 01/13/2024 – Tech

It’s a hit and miss: as soon as WhatsApp goes offline, notifications begin to arrive from contacts subscribing to Telegram.

“I myself only remember that there are other applications when WhatsApp goes down”, says publicist Gustavo Garcia, 31. “I used Telegram just to watch political groups, but it never came close to replacing WhatsApp. In the end, they are all kind of similar , and you go where your friends are”, he says.

The list of apps is long, ranging from giants like WhatsApp —which even make payments— to those on the outside, like Signal, selling security and privacy.

It is impossible to know exactly how many users each application has because companies do not disclose this information. But monitoring services and consultancies make estimates, and one of the most complete comes from the data analysis company Similarweb.

The company’s survey shows that the sector leader is, by far, Meta, with two of the most popular applications: WhatsApp, globally, and Messenger (Facebook chat, which exists as an independent application), strong in the United States.

WhatsApp is the number 1 messaging app in at least 61 countries analyzed, including, of course, Brazil, but also almost all of Latin America, India and much of Western Europe. Messenger, in turn, appears first in at least 15 countries, including Canada and Australia, in addition to the USA.

The Russian Telegram is the strongest in ten other countries, such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It is the official channel used by the Ukrainian government, for example, including President Volodimir Zelenski, to disseminate information about the Ukrainian War.

Viber appears in Eastern European countries, and there are regionalized options, such as the powerful WeChat, in China, and the South Korean KakaoTalk, popular in their countries of origin. Signal does not appear as predominant in any country.

Similarweb data, however, only considers users of the Android operating system, which represents 70% of the global smartphone market.

The numbers are more accurate where Android phones are predominant, such as in Brazil, where more than 80% of the population uses the operating system.

In other places they may be less representative, such as in the USA, where the Google system is used on only 4 out of 10 devices.

Even though WhatsApp leads globally, that doesn’t mean that other apps are finished. Among Android users, Similarweb counts 1.2 billion people who access WhatsApp daily, compared to 404 million for Facebook Messenger, 196 million for Telegram and 168 million for Snapchat.

Heloisa Massaro, director of InternetLab, conducts annual research on the use of messaging applications and states that the platforms “occupy very different places in people’s lives” and are not exclusive.

WhatsApp is part of everyday life and is used to connect people close to us, such as friends and families, as well as companies and services. Chats on social networks such as Instagram and Facebook work to connect people who are not so close, such as old colleagues or people for whom the user does not have a phone number.

Telegram and other platforms like Discord are where people go to seek connections based on similar interests, something close to a social network, more than a messaging platform, says Massaro. “It’s where people go to join Turkish soap opera groups to download episodes, look for books or discuss politics.”

Because they have different uses, the growth of one application does not necessarily mean the growth of the other.

In total, WhatsApp claims to have more than 2 billion active users, although it does not disclose the exact numbers. The 2022 Datafolha survey found that 92% of respondents said they used the Meta application. In the InternetLab survey, 99.3% of respondents said they use the app.

WhatsApp was the first application to become popular by sending messages with internet data to users identified by their cell phone number. When it emerged, it competed only with BlackBerry’s BBM, exclusive to smartphone users that no longer exist.

Today WhatsApp is on its way to becoming the first Western “superapp”, trying to take the place that WeChat has in the Chinese market on this side of the globe.

The Tencent app, in addition to sending messages, became a social network and has become one of the main forms of payment in China today.

WhatsApp launched a tool in 2020 to send money to other users within the app, and in 2023 it allowed direct payments to companies.

The novelty, however, has not yet caught on, amid the success of Pix in Brazil. In 2022, according to Febraban (Brazilian Federation of Banks), there were 56.2 million transactions via WhatsApp in Brazil — 37% of which were financial transactions and the rest were balance, statement, credit card and debt inquiries.

The number seems high, but it is tiny compared to the 163.3 billion transactions carried out in the country in the same year.

Meta’s most incisive move to position WhatsApp as a superapp was the creation of “Flows” in September 2023, a tool that provides an advanced menu for business accounts, which could even replace company websites.

Within a conversation with a bus company, for example, it is possible to book a ticket and select a seat without leaving the chat.

Since the end of November, users in São Luís, Teresina, Juazeiro do Norte (CE) and Sobral (CE) have been able to request Uber rides within WhatsApp.

In the world, only the Chinese WeChat comes close in terms of number of users. Considered a “superapp”, the Tencent application is no longer just a messaging platform and is now almost unavoidable in everyday Chinese life, used as a social networking, payments and shopping platform.

The company’s third quarter balance sheet states that the combined versions of WeChat (Western name) and Weixin (name in China) have 1.3 billion monthly active users.

Telegram claims that it has 700 million monthly active users (a much higher number than that measured by Similarweb among Android users).

In Brazil, the app is the third most popular according to Similarweb among Android users, behind only WhatsApp and the corporate version, WhatsApp Business.