LONDON: The consumer survey reveals WhatsApp is installed on almost 9.7 million Dutch phones and in March 2015 the use penetration reached 88 percent, from 82 percent as it was in April, 2014. This means that WhatsApp has become more popular than ever on the market, but it’s not appealing to the Dutch teenagers who own smartphones, because in the past six months, many of them uninstalled WhatsApp and gave Snapchat a try.
Last month, Snapchat had over 1.7 million users in the Netherlands, being used mostly by younger people, and the number of installs grew almost three-fold compared to 2014, reaching 16 percent of all Dutch smartphone users.
On Snapchat, the users can take photos, record videos, personalize them with text and drawings, then send them to their friends. They are called “Snaps” and the recipients have between 1 and 10 seconds to view them (the sender can set the time limit), then they will be deleted from the recipient’s device and from Snapchat’s servers.
In May, last year, the users sent 700 million photos and videos daily and the majority of users are aged between 13 and 23 years. The company was estimated to worth between 10 and 20 billion dollars, depending on different sources. The latest stable release of Snapchat is 9.5.1.
On the other hand, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, it has 800 million active users and more people are registering everyday to make free voice calls. This feature was brought in February to the Android version, and recently, the developers turned their attention to the iOS and Blackerry 10 users as well.
