India now has the highest number of monthly active users for WhatsApp at 160 million users. To highlight the importance, the messaging company, on Tuesday, did a global launch of its video calling feature from New Delhi.
Jan Koum, CEO & Co-Founder, WhatsApp said, “Video calling is one of the most requested features from people in India. We're proud to have the opportunity to launch this feature in India, where we now have 160 million users, and we look forward to seeing people use WhatsApp to talk to their friends and loved ones face to face.”
Neeraj Arora, Head of Business, WhatsApp told BusinessLine that the growth in usage in India has gone beyond expectations. “India has adopted WhatsApp like we coudn’t imagine. We see farmers use WhatsApp to share knowledge on where to get seeds an how to use different fertilisers. Students are using for education and sharing knowledge.”
Arora said that since WhatsApp was built before 3G and 4G started rolling out in countries like India, the platform is conditioned to work in low bandwidth areas. “We spent a lot of time building for these conditions and that has worked well for us especially in India,” Arora said adding that localisation including enabling multilingual conversations on the platform has helped the company penetrate deep.
The feature is already available to users who have the beta version of the app installed. It is likely to roll out to all other users by tonight.