WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps in the world and there’s very little to doubt that. But even the most optimistic person couldn’t have envisaged it becoming this popular.
According to a Forbes report late on Monday, 20 August, the data released by the US-based app analytics company Apptopia showed that in the past three months, WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users spent 85 billion hours on the app. This translates to “11.425 hours for every human being on the planet”.
The top 10 apps overall – in terms of time spent globally – are WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, Messenger, Pandora, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Google Maps and Spotify.
The data does not include all of China's third-party Android app stores. If they would have, then WeChat and other China-focused apps would be leading the charts of this report.
WhatsApp might have become popular, with billions of active users, but the platform has come under scathing attack due to the spread of fake news on it. Incidents of lynching and communal attacks have been triggered due to messages spread on the app in India.
In addition to WhatsApp, users also spent 30 billion hours on Facebook, giving the parent company an unassailable lead with both WhatsApp and Facebook getting big numbers.
Four of the top 10 apps by time spent are Facebook's Messenger, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Google is leading in the area as well, with YouTube and Google Maps featuring in the list as well.
Among the games, Clash of Clans topped the list with 3.83 billion hours spent on it in the last three months, followed by My Talking Tom, Candy Crush Saga, Fortnite, Lords Mobile, Subway Surfers, Helix Jump, Slither.io, PUBG Mobile and Fishdom.
According to Apptopia, it gets its numbers by being integrated into hundreds of thousands of apps, which allows it to see performance data globally.
(With IANS inputs)
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