Gmail and WhatsApp each top 1 billion users

Facebook and Google have both reached a significant milestone with two of their products. Google’s Gmail and Facebook owned WhatsApp messenger both boast more than one billion monthly active users.

Gmail’s milestone moment was revealed during parent company Alphabet’s Q4 earnings call Monday; then, moments later, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his Facebook page to announce WhatsApp’s achievement.

“WhatsApp’s community has more than doubled since joining Facebook. We’ve added the ability for you to call loved ones far away. We’ve dropped the subscription fee and made WhatsApp completely free. Next, we’re going to work to connect more people around the world and make it easier to communicate with businesses,” he wrote.

“There are only a few services that connect more than a billion people. This milestone is an important step towards connecting the entire world.”

Last month, WhatsApp announced it would drop its $0.99 subscription fee, making the platform free for its nearly one billion users worldwide.

Facebook itself also boasts more than a billion monthly users. The company also noted that its own instant messaging service Messenger is close to the one million user mark during its earnings call last week.

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Gmail, on the other hand, took much longer to reach the one billion user milestone. The service was launched back in 2004.

However, Google has a lot more products than Facebook, many of which already see over a billion monthly users, including Android, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Search and Google Play.

Alphabet’s earnings call also revealed that, for the first time since 2010, Apple has lost the title of “World’s Most Valuable Company” to Google’s parent company.

Alphabet’s value has risen to $560 billion while Apple is now worth $538 billion. Google, meanwhile, produced an operating profit of $6.8 billion on revenue of $21.2 billion.