Facebook Messenger now has one billion active users

Facebook Messenger now has one billion active users each month, making it as big as Facebook’s other messaging app, WhatsApp, and the third Facebook product — along with the flagship Facebook app — to reach a billion active users.

Messenger, which is starting to get into lots of other areas not usually native to messaging, like shopping, customer service and games, added 100 million new users in the last three months — and in the three-month stretch from January to March, too.

So it’s growing pretty steadily. Here’s what that growth looks like.

If you’ll remember, Messenger growth really started to take off once Facebook spun the product out of the flagship app, forcing users who wanted to send and receive messages on mobile to download Messenger as well. People were pretty pissed about it at the time, but it doesn’t seem to have hampered things at all.

You might also remember that Facebook owns a second messaging app, also with a billion users. It’s been two and a half years since Facebook paid $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, and both apps seem to be growing steadily.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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