LINE has broken records by reaching 300 million users across the world thanks to the spectacular increase that occurred over the last six months, which saw its previous user count double. The app that offers the most solid alternative to WhatsApp is seeing this unstoppable growth, according to the company, due to its growing popularity in Spanish-speaking countries like Spain and Mexico.
LINE, which announced the new figure yesterday morning on its official blog, hopes to take its user count to 500 million during the next year, and from the looks of its current growth it seems that the Japanese app might actually be able to do it. A little more than six months ago the tool had a 1.5 million users, and now it is on the way to unseating the leader of free messaging, WhatsApp, which now has 350 million active users.
It’s remains true, however, that the traffic generated by LINE is not even close to the level of WhatsApp’s: last June the latter broke its own record when it announced that 27 billion messages had been sent in a single day.
There are many factors that may have played a role in users’ sudden interest in LINE, among them the fact that WhatsApp began charging for its app almost nine months ago. It’s also important to take into account that LINE allows users to make totally free voice and video calls, a service its U.S. counterpart does not provide, and also offers a selection of games to play directly in the app itself.
LINE’s stickers, popular around the world and already recognizable to any user, are making an increasingly big splash in the world of instant messaging, cutting with gigantic slices into the market share of the industry leader with LINE’s many extra functionalities, ranging from its desktop app to the mini-games that the studio publishes alongside the app.
