Gmail, WhatsApp Hit One Billion Users

During Alphabet’s first earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai commented that as of this month, Gmail now officially has one billion monthly active users.

The Gmail app for Android, by comparison, hit one billion installs a little over 20 months ago, back in May 2014. And that was two years after Gmail became the most popular email service on the planet. When that occurred in 2012, Google reported around 425 million MAUs for Gmail, meaning the service has grown its active user base twice over in around three-and-a-half years.

Even though Gmail, which launched in 2004, took much longer to hit 1 billion users, Google still has more products counting more than a billion monthly active users. Android, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Search and Google Play each have more than a billion monthly actives.

WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook, has also announced that it has reached 1 billion users

“We’re excited to see how far we’ve come,” WhatsApp said in a blog post on Monday. “But now, it’s back to work — because we still have another 6 billion people to get on WhatsApp, and a long way left to go.”

All in, Facebook paid $22 billion for WhatsApp. It bought the messaging service in February 2014.

WhatsApp has not yet figured out how it plans to make money. The service said this month it would no longer charge 99 cents for subscriptions after the first year of use. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an earnings call with investors last week that WhatsApp may explore making money from discussions between users and businesses.