How WhatsApp became the world’s default messaging app

Year 2014, wired As part of my internship application, I was asked to write a few lines about the apps I use most. I write about WhatsApp because it is a given. I am an international student from India and this is a lifeline for my family and my girlfriend (now my wife) who lives on the other side of the world. “This cross-platform messaging tool is entirely the result of my two-year long-distance relationship that is still going strong,” I wrote in my application. “Skype is great and Google+ Hangouts is the best thing since Gmail. But nothing says ‘I love you’ like a WhatsApp text.”

A few months after the internship, Facebook announced that it would acquire WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion.exist wiredThere were audible gasps in the company’s newsroom at the price tag for this seemingly meager player. American journalists are no strangers to WhatsApp. While the rest of the world has moved on to the app created by two former Yahoo!’s, much of the country remains locked in a battle between green and blue bubbles.Engineers are at wiredbackyard with mountain view.

In 2014, text messaging is one of the few things you can do on WhatsApp. There were no emojis to react to, no HD videos to send, no GIFs or stickers, no read receipts until the end of that year, and of course, no voice or video calls. Yet more than 500 million people around the world were hooked, reveling in the freedom to use nascent cellular data to exchange unlimited messages with friends and family rather than paying mobile operators for every text message.

WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton launched the app in 2009 simply to display status messages next to the names of people in their phone’s address book. But later that year, when Apple launched push notifications on the iPhone, it evolved into a full-fledged messaging service. Today, 15 years later, WhatsApp has become even more important: it is an integral part of the propaganda machine of American political parties, the way millions of people reach customers, the way to reach people and business people, and the power of publications, brands and influencers The way. , video conferencing systems and private social networks. For long-distance lovers, this is still a great way to stay connected.

“WhatsApp is a little bit like a media platform, a little bit like a messaging platform, but it’s not quite those things,” said Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton University who directs the university’s Digital Witnessing Lab, which conducted the experiment. Study how information flows through WhatsApp. Well gadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of a social media platform because there are no recommendations and there’s no social graph.”

In fact, WhatsApp’s size dwarfs almost all social networks and messaging apps. In 2020, WhatsApp had more than 2 billion users worldwide. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million). It far surpasses meta-platform Instagram, which has about 1.4 billion users. The only one is Facebook itself, with over three billion users.

WhatsApp has become the world’s default messaging platform. Ten years after its acquisition, its growth shows no signs of stopping. Even in the US, it’s finally starting to break out of the green and blue bubble battle, and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services.As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg New York Times Last year, WhatsApp began a “new chapter” for the company.

Longtime Meta executive Will Cathcart, who took over WhatsApp in 2019 after its original founders left the company, attributes WhatsApp’s early global growth to the fact that it’s free (or nearly free – WhatsApp used to charge people $1 a year). Almost any phone, including the millions of low-end Android devices in the world, can reliably deliver messages even with poor network conditions across large swathes of the planet, and best of all, it’s simple enough that most Bells and whistles found in other messaging apps. In 2013, a year before Facebook acquired WhatsApp, WhatsApp added the ability to send short audio messages.

“It’s really powerful,” Cathcart told Engadget. “People who are not very literate or new to the internet can launch WhatsApp, use it for the first time and understand it.”

In 2016, WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted, which Cathcart said was a huge selling point. This feature makes WhatsApp a black box, hiding message content from everyone except the sender and recipient (even WhatsApp). In the same year, WhatsApp had 1 billion people using the service every month.

This explosive growth also had a huge downside: As cheap smartphones and data prices brought hundreds of millions of people online for the first time in densely populated areas like Brazil and India, WhatsApp became a conduit for hoaxes and misinformation. Free flow. India is now WhatsApp’s biggest market with more than 700 million users, and the app targets opposition parties with propaganda and disinformation and cheers for nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been accused of undermining his secular fabric.

Then people started dying. In 2017 and 2018, crazed thugs in remote areas of the country forwarded baseless rumors about child abductions via WhatsApp, involving nearly 20 people in 13 separate incidents. In response to the crisis, WhatsApp took action. Among other things, it’s making significant changes to the product, such as forwarding messages (the main way misinformation spreads on the service) and the number of people and groups users can forward content to at the same time.

In Brazil, the app was a key tool in the 2018 victory of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, a far-right strongman who aims to allow his supporters to bypass WhatsApp’s spam controls, has launched an elaborate disinformation campaign, blasting thousands of WhatsApp messages attacking his opponent Fernando. Haddad.

Since these incidents, WhatsApp has established fact-checking partnerships with more than 50 fact-checking organizations around the world (because WhatsApp is encrypted, fact-checking organizations rely on users to report messages to its WhatsApp hotline and respond with fact-checks). It also made other product changes, such as letting users quickly search forwarded messages so they can be fact-checked within the app. “We may do more over time,” Cathcart said, including possibly using artificial intelligence to help WhatsApp with fact-checking. “We can do a lot of interesting things there, and I don’t think we’re done yet,” he said.

Recently, WhatsApp has been rapidly adding new features, such as the ability to share large archives, messages that automatically destroy after viewing, Instagram-like stories (called statuses), and larger group calls. But a new feature called Channels, launching globally in the fall of 2023, fulfills WhatsApp’s ambition to become more than a messaging app. When WhatsApp announced the launch of Channels, it described Channels as “a one-way broadcast tool for administrators to send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls.” They’re kind of like a Twitter feed from brands, publishers, and people you choose to follow. It has a dedicated tab in WhatsApp, although interaction with the content is limited to responding with emojis – there are no responses. WhatsApp told Engadget that there are currently thousands of channels on WhatsApp, with more than 250 of them having more than 1 million followers. They include Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (18.9 million followers), Narendra Modi (13.8 million followers), FC Barcelona (27.7 million followers) and WWE (10.9 million followers). Although still in its early stages, channels are quickly becoming a way for publishers to distribute content and build audiences.

“It took us a year to get to 35,000 followers on Telegram,” Rachel Banning-Lover, head of social media and development at the Financial Times (155,000 followers) Nieman Laboratory November. “In comparison, we [grew] Followers of similar size [on WhatsApp] Within two weeks. “

WhatsApp’s success in constantly adding new features without succumbing to feature creep has allowed it to thrive among its core audience and, more recently, users in the United States. WhatsApp had nearly 83 million users in the United States in January 2024, up from 80 million a year earlier, according to data shared with Engadget by analytics firm Data.ai. A few years ago, WhatsApp launched an advertising campaign in the United States, its first in the country, with billboards and TV spots promoting the app’s focus on privacy.

Zuckerberg himself shares the same view, proposing a “privacy-centered vision for social networks” on his Facebook page in 2021. “I believe that the future of communications will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other is safe and that their messages and content don’t stay,” he wrote. “That’s me Hopefully a future we can help make happen.”

Meta has now begun leveraging WhatsApp’s massive scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear how much money, if any, the app will make. “The business model that we’re really excited about is helping people talk to businesses through WhatsApp, which we’ve been successfully developing for a few years,” Cathcart said. “It’s been a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into the existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. It integrates the entire system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook and click to directly open a WhatsApp chat with the business.The company says these have become the fastest-growing ad formats on Meta New York Times.

A few years ago, the configuration of Facebook’s internal network changed and multiple Facebook services, including WhatsApp, were disconnected for more than 6 hours, bringing the world to a standstill.

“It would be like having your phone and all your loved ones’ phones turned off without warning. [WhatsApp] Essentially an unregulated utility,” journalist Aura Bogado wrote on Twitter at the time. In 2017 and 2017, gig workers were unable to reach customers and lost wages. In London, traders trading cryptocurrencies are unable to communicate with their clients. One company claimed a 15% drop. In Russia, oil market traders were unable to contact buyers in Europe and Asia to place orders.

Fifteen years after its creation, this messaging app has taken over the world.

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