WhatsApp Tops the Chatting Messenger Apps Market in South Africa

WhatsApp Messenger is enjoying envy-creating popularity. In fact, every other messaging app dreams to get the popularity that this messenger has! This April, WhatsApp claimed to have become “bigger than Twitter”! And interestingly, if latest research and surveys are to be believed, it still has the same status in South Africa.

However, it needs to be noted that it doesn’t have any official use count based on country or location and follows an overall –approach in counting its users just the way other apps have it done. If operating systems are to be brought into consideration, it tops the most popular free app charts whether on Apple’s iTune App Store or on Android’s Google Play and the Windows Phone store also doesn’t get missed out.

So, it won’t be wrong to say that WhatsApp is really very popular messaging app. And it has already beaten Facebook and Twitter in the number of downloads that it has got!

Surveys suggest that WhatsApps users in South Africa are somewhere around 15 million which is quite high and even outranks other messaging applications popular in the regions like Mixit which has only 7.4 million users, BlackBerry Messenger 4.7 million as per the estimations. At the same time Facebook and Twitter enjoys with 9.4 million and 5.5 million users respectively.

The reason why WhatsApp is doing so well in South Africa is that it is mostly used through Nokia which has recently brought out Asha device which has a special button for WhatsApp. And as the market for BlackBerry is shrinking lately, the BBM users are also shifting toward WhatsApp increasing its user base. However, the speculations suggest that the cross platform versions of BB to come in the near future will give better position to BBM’s position.

Another chatting messenger namely, WeChat from Tencent, is also found to be doing well in the region. But only time will decide whether or not WeChat will be able to take the place of WhatsApp, currently it has a lot to do!