India’s love affair with WhatsApp

A recent survey by US-based Jana Mobile found that 55% of mobile messaging users in India use WhatsApp.

BANGALORE: Mahesh Murthy, founder of digital marketing firm Pinstorm, is holidaying in Peru's capital Lima. But he's also using the holiday to plan a high school reunion in Kerala some time in August this year.

Even as he soaks in the churches and monasteries of Lima, Murthy is constantly onWhatsApp to unite his jet-setting friends from Seattle, Norway and Holland at the Kerala reunion.

"It's such a smart chat app to stay in touch with the group," Murthy told TOI on the phone from Lima. WhatsApp is India's preferred mobile messaging application. The youth are obsessed, the older folk too are increasingly shifting from SMS to mobile messaging services, especially WhatsApp. This can be a huge benefit for Facebook.

A recent survey by US-based Jana Mobile, an organization focused on redirecting advertising budgets to mobile phones, found that 55% of mobile messaging users in India use WhatsApp. Another estimate puts WhatsApp's monthly active users in India at 36 million, rival Hike's at 15 million and Line's at 16 million. There are also other messaging services including WeChat, Rocketalk, JaxtrSMS, Gupshup Messenger and Nimbuzz. WeChat says it was the second most downloaded app on Apple iOS in India last year.

Sanjay Vijaykumar, founder of Kerala-based mobile internet company MobMe, said the company had a board meeting on Thursday and they circulated the minutes to 25-30 senior members of the leadership team through WhatsApp. "Even before we put out the minutes on paper or email, we sent it using WhatsApp. I trust WhatsApp to circulate critical information. For me, it's a simple, effective tool to connect with multiple groups and get office work done in a jiffy," he said.

Aayush Bagaria, 22, an engineering graduate, said one big attraction was that WhatsApp was free and therefore more cost effective than SMS. "The phone's contacts list auto syncs with WhatsApp, which is not the case with Blackberry or Hike. You can do group chats, and I have several groups including of my college and school friends. But the biggest advantage is the ease with which you can share files like images, videos and audios with large groups," said Bagaria, who recently gifted his aunt a smartphone, partly so that she could get on to WhatsApp.

Kavin Mittal, creator of the Hike messenger service, said India was following a growth trajectory similar to the global one in the messaging space with the proliferation of cheaper smartphones and data plans. Mittal said users will soon be able to do much more on messaging apps. "We've just scraped the surface of what's possible with the mobile internet," he added
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