Facebook Messenger now has 1.3 monthly active users, the company revealed this morning in a Facebook post. Messenger surpassed the 1.2 billion monthly active users mark in April and the 1 billion mark in July 2016.
“We’ve continued working hard to make Messenger the best it can be, introducing new masks, filters and reactions for video chat, more suggestions from M and making our virtual personal assistant available in more places around the world, rolling our more Instant Games more broadly and bringing Messenger Lite to more countries,” reads the post on the Messenger Facebook page.
Having 1.3 billion monthly active users puts Facebook Messenger on par with WhatsApp, which passed the same figure in July. Both are owned by Facebook and enjoy two of the largest user bases of any chat app on the planet.
The growth comes as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp take steps towards monetization. A global ads beta for a limited number of Messenger users started in July, while verified business accounts became available in late August.
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Separately, Facebook is reportedly making its own video chat device and smart speaker, potentially with an intelligent assistant to rival Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, that anonymous sources told Bloomberg could be out as soon as spring 2018.
