Statistics and facts about mobile messenger app usage

As of 2015, 75 percent of internet users worldwide had accessed messaging services on mobile devices. Fuelled by mobile internet and smartphone growth, mobile messaging apps have become a strong force in the mobile app sector, offering users an alternative to SMS-based texting paired with social media elements and enhanced features such as group chats and photo sharing. Some messaging services such as Skype had already existed previously on desktop, some like Facebook Messenger are based on pre-existing social networks and others such as WhatsApp are mobile-based.

With over 800 million monthly active users, WhatsApp is the most popular mobile messaging app worldwide. Facebook Messenger is ranked second with 700 million MAU, followed by Chinese services QQ Mobile and WeChat.

Due to the strong social aspect of mobile messengers, the average retention rate of messaging apps is approximately double the rate of all other mobile apps – throughout the first year of usage, messaging apps have had a consistent retention rate of over sixty percent. Recent research data reveals that the majority of U.S. internet users accessed messaging apps on a daily basis, with WhatsApp being the messenger app with the highest engagement rate. Younger generations prefer Facebook Messenger: a third of Millennial internet users worldwide used the messenger app and 37 percent of teenagers in the United States did the same. Facebook Messenger’s popularity can be traced back to the ubiquity of its parent company Facebook – as of June 2015, the social network had close to 1.5 billion monthly active users worldwide.

According to a spring 2015 survey, 36 percent of smartphone owners in the United States used mobile messaging apps. The majority of U.S. chat app users are young, college-educated and living in urban areas.

Mobile messaging apps are blurring the lines between messaging and mobile social networks. Photo-sharing apps Instagram and Snapchat are no pure messaging platforms yet due to their private messaging functions and the increasing appeal of social content sharing, many younger users actually prefer these networks to standard messaging apps. As of July 2014, Snapchat users sent a total of 700 million photo messages every day.

Several apps such as LINE or Kakaotalk have successfully launched mobile gaming platforms. According to company reports, Daum Kakao’s gaming revenue amounted to 53.98 billion Korean Won in the second quarter of 2015. LINE has also seen success with mobile digital sticker sales.

This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text.

Picture: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype