Gigaom reports on the astonishing success of WhatsApp:

WhatsApp is now delivering an eye-popping 1 billion messages a day on six different platforms, which it claims puts ahead of any other independent messaging apps. GOGII's textPlus, for a little perspective, announced in June it had crossed the 10 billion text messages sent milestone since launching in June 2009. WhatsApp is the number one paid social networking app in the Apple App Store, and has more than 10 million downloads on Android with 369,270 user reviews, more than almost any other Android communication app. And it's used in 250 countries (ed- there are only 196 countries) on 750 networks. While the market has consolidated, WhatsApp has kept its head down and continued to execute.

"People appreciate a good product, a stable system. They want to communicate easily and use a product that just works."

I was constantly surprised at just how successful the app seemed to be considering the frustrating problems I experienced daily. Frequent long lag times between launching the app and it connecting to their servers meant that many times I had to resort back to sms. Many times it would never connect at all. But when the lag was short the app worked wonderfully. Though not near as feature rich, iMessage has proven to be far more reliable.

From the WhatsApp blog: "Just how much is 1 billion messages? That is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second". Wow!

Gigaom