Just after making a their big acquisition announcement last week, WhatsApp has dropped another big one and announced that they will be adding voice calls to their popular messaging service.
CEO of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, made the big announcement himself at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today.
While no official date has been set for the arrival of voice calls to WhatsApp, Koum said that the new service will be made availbel to WhatsApp users by the second quarter of the year.
Voice calls will first be rolled out only for iOS and Android phones, while Nokia and BlackBerry devices will follow suit later on.
Some sources claim that the WhatsApp voice calls will possibly be free, for a limited time. Much like WhatsApp messaging, it is expected that users will be able to use the service for free, initially, after which they will have to pay a yearly subscription fee – like the $0.99 subscription fee for messaging.
The company is also said to be optimizing the amount of data used for these calls, to keep the cost down to a minimum.
Koum‘s announcement comes on a rather special day for the company; today is WhatsApp‘s birthday, and believe it or not, the company is only 5 years old. Some massive achievements for a company that is technically still a “˜toddler‘.
While announcing WhatsApp plans to branch out to voice calls, Koum also revealed the latest user stats for the $19 billion company.
According to Koum, WhatsApp now has 465 million monthly active users and 330 million active daily users. What‘s really impressive, is that that number has increased by 15 million since the announcement of Facebook‘s acquisition only last week.
There is absolutely no denying that WhatsApp is on a roll. The addition of voice calls puts them in direct competition with other popular messaging apps such as Line, BBM and KakaoTalk, who also offer voice calling services.
Whether or not we‘ll see more upgrades/changes to WhatsApp now that they are under Facebook‘s wing, remains to be seen. However, we do know that WhatsApp has firmly placed itself as a leader in mobile communication.
Would you make use of WhatsApp voice calls? Tell us your thoughts.
Source: TechCrunch