Back in the early days of the internet, pretty much everyone you knew had a Hotmail or Yahoo email address. However Google came along with Gmail which offered up way more email storage, as well as an email UI that was considerably cleaner and less cluttered than what competing services offered.
Fast forward to today and seeing someone with a Gmail address hardly comes as a surprise (in fact seeing people still use Hotmail is the real surprise here). Gmail’s popularity is a given and now according to a tweet by Google, we have an idea of how popular Gmail is because the tweet is boasting that the email service now has 1.5 billion active users.
Now that doesn’t mean that there are actually 1.5 billion people around the world using Gmail. Given that there are plenty of people out there with multiple Gmail accounts (some separate work and personal emails), the actual number of people using Gmail is probably less, but it’s still an impressive figure all the same.
This is an interesting look into Google and how reliant we’ve become on its services. To put things into perspective and context, Facebook too boasts an impressive active user count at over 2 billion monthly active users.
https://twitter.com/gmail/status/1055806807174725633