More than 3 billion people now use WhatsApp to communicate every month. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s first quarter results conference call on Wednesday.

It took WhatsApp 5 years to add a billion more users, after the company announced in 2020 that it had hit the 2 billion monthly users milestone. Facebook acquired the instant messaging service for $19 billion in 2014, and the app has had tremendous growth since then. WhatsApp remains one of the few apps to have surpassed the 3 billion user milestone, alongside Facebook, according to TechCrunch.

As Meta advances its AI development, WhatsApp remains a key part of that strategy, thanks to its massive user base. In 2024, Meta CFO Susan Li stated that WhatsApp in India had become the company’s largest market for AI usage, in terms of retention and engagement. Speaking during the conference call on Wednesday, Li said, “We see people engage with Meta AI from several different entry points. WhatsApp continues to see the strongest Meta AI usage across our family of apps.”

In the US, adoption of Meta’s AI products has not been plain sailing. Most of the people in the US still use their phone’s default messaging app for texting, and Meta has had to adopt a different approach, which involves the release of its new standalone AI app.

“We hope to become the leader over time [in the U.S. messaging market], but we’re in a different position there than we are in most of the rest of the world on WhatsApp. So I think that the Meta AI app as a standalone is going to be particularly important in the United States to establish leadership in — as the main personal AI that people use. But we’re going to keep on advancing the experiences across the board in all of these different areas,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

While WhatsApp is free to use with no ads, the Business version of the app remains a key part of the Meta family of apps and accounted for a significant portion of the $510 million in revenue announced in the first-quarter results.