It’s not just WhatsApp that made it to reach more than one billion active users. Google also announced that its email client, Gmail, is also used by more than one billion active users worldwide. That’s up from 900 million active users back in May 2015.
Gmail’s competitors, Outlook had more than 420 million users as of 2013. Microsoft hasn’t shared new data since. Yahoo Mail had more than 281 million users as of 2012. Yahoo too hasn’t shared new stats since.
Gmail joins the league of Google Search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Google Play, and Google Maps, the other services from the Mountain View-based company that boast of more than one billion monthly active users.
Other Alphabet services with more than 1 billion active users include Google Search, YouTube, Google Maps, Android, and Chrome.
Launched in beta in 2004, Gmail has slowly grown to become a household name, with millions of users using it for their personal use, and thousands of businesses relying on Google’s service for email. Google removed the beta label from its Gmail client in 2009. Pichai says that there has been a rapid mobile growth in the usage of Gmail.