Facebook Messenger now has over 800 million monthly users

Facebook is kicking off the New Year with a new milestone. The social networking giant announced Thursday that it’s standalone app Facebook Messenger now has more than 800 million active monthly users.

By comparison, Facebook Messenger’s biggest competition, WhatsApp, has over 900 million monthly active users, according to numbers released by the company in September. However, Facebook owns that platform too.

Facebook made a significant number of changes to the messaging platform in 2015 – from introducing a video calling feature, to opening up the service to those who don’t even have a Facebook account.

“We created all these experiences with a mindset of helping hundreds of millions of people manage their daily interactions with people, businesses, and services more seamlessly than ever,” said VP of messaging products David Marcus in a Facebook post.

Marcus also provided some vague insight into the future of the messaging platform in his post, hinting that the company hopes Messenger could soon be the hub for all things on your smartphone.

“At Messenger we’re thinking about how we can help you interact with businesses or services to buy items, order rides, purchase airline tickets, and talk to customer service in truly frictionless and delightful ways. It is so much easier to do everything in one place that has the context of your last interactions, as well as your identity (no need to ever login), rather than downloading apps that you’ll never use again and jumping around from one app to another,” he wrote.