Today at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg noted in his keynote that Messenger and WhatsApp combined process a staggering 60 billion messages per day, far more than SMS messages which are sent at a volume of 20 billion daily.
Zuckerberg also stated that Facebook Messenger is the second most popular app on iOS globally, coming in just after the Facebook app itself.
Messenger grew faster than the Facebook app in 2015 and now has 900 million users, 200 million more than was announced at last year’s conference. Messenger’s rate of growth has outstripped that of Facebook’s other popular messaging app WhatsApp, acquired in 2014.
With the popularity of messaging clearly evident through the numbers, Facebook made its focus clear: chatbots. The company announced a bot platform for Messenger, joining competing messaging apps Kik, Line and Telegram in offering a specific repository for bots.
Related reading: Facebook reveals file sharing, chatbots for Messenger and more at F82016
[source]Facebook[/source]
