WhatsApp may be “bigger than Twitter” but it’s not without its competition in the mobile messaging space. Case in point: China-based Tencent’s WeChat app.
The company’s deputy general manager Hou Xiaonan recently revealed that the company’s social messaging app WeChat now has 190 million monthly active users out of a total registered user base of 300 million. The company is also anticipating 400 million users will be on WeChat later this month.
This number is tantalizingly close to the 200 million claimed by WhatsApp Messenger according to recent numbers pushed out in April, although WhatsApp and even Japan’s LINE app are still far more popular internationally.
Still, with the kind of growth that WeChat — indeed, the entire mobile messaging space — has been seeing as of late, it could be just a matter of time before WeChat rises to popularity outside its home country.