Facebook passes 1 billion mobile-only monthly users

In its third quarter 2016 earnings announcement today, Facebook revealed it now has 1.79 billion monthly active users (up 16 percent year over year) and 1.66 billion mobile users (up 20 percent year over year). The company also shared that it now has 1.18 billion daily active users (a 17 percent bump year over year) and 1.09 billion mobile daily active users (a 22 percent increase year over year).

Breaking the numbers down, 65.9 percent of all Facebook members use the service daily, and 65.7 percent of mobile members use it daily, as well. All of Facebook’s numbers are still slowly growing, even on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Facebook’s total monthly active user base grew 4.68 percent in the third quarter.

But the big highlight for this past quarter is yet another new 1 billion figure milestone. For the first time in the social network’s history, 1 billion users access the service monthly only on mobile daily.

At the end of 2015, Facebook passed the halfway mark for mobile-only users (51.7 percent to be exact). And that number continues to grow: 58.9 percent of Facebook users now access the social network exclusively from a mobile device.

Between Q2 and Q3, Facebook added 88 million mobile-only users. This number has been climbing every quarter at a staggering rate, with no slowdown in sight.

Here is how Facebook describes this category of users:

Mobile-only MAUs are defined as users who accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or mobile versions of our website, or used our Messenger mobile app (and is also a registered Facebook user) during the period of measurement. The number of mobile-only MAUs do not include Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users based on their other activities on Facebook.

We’re surprised Facebook still doesn’t break out this number in its earnings release. And the company still isn’t sharing how many mobile-only daily users it’s seeing.

Here are the other four charts for the numbers Facebook traditionally highlights in its releases: