Facebook is reporting that Messenger has reached more than 1 billion active monthly users.“Today we are announcing that more than 1 billion people now use Facebook Messenger every month, making Messenger one of only a handful of apps worldwide that touch so many lives,” the company wrote on its news blog
Messenger has grown rapidly in 2016, gaining around 100 million active users every three months. The service hit 800 million users in January and 900 million in April. Facebook released a flurry of stats about Messenger, noting that Messenger has become the second most popular iOS app of all time (behind Facebook, of course). It’s been downloaded over 1 billion times on Android, and 1 billion messages are sent between people and businesses every month.
People are using Messenger for more than just text messages. The app also allows users to make voice over IP (VoIP) calls to each other. The functionality has become such a popular part of the service that Messenger now accounts for 10 percent of all the VoIP calls made on the Internet. Messenger users are also sending each other 22 million GIFs every day. Gaming has also been a popular feature on the app, with users playing 1.2 billion games of basketball and 250 million games of soccer through its games interface.
The platform is also becoming an important way for businesses to interact with their customers. Messenger currently hosts more than 18,000 bots, with 23,000 developers having signed up for the company’s bot development program.
