Why does everyone use WhatsApp?

 Why does everyone use WhatsApp?

More than three billion people use WhatsApp every month. Founded in 2009, the platform has more users than YouTube and is on par with Facebook.

Co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton designed it to work as well on BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Phone as they do on iPhones. It quickly became a way for people to communicate across devices and countries.

Koum and Acton sold the app to Meta (then Facebook) in 2014, and WhatsApp has continued to grow. The New Yorker magazine spoke to Knight about why the app has surpassed other messaging and social media platforms and where it’s going next. Here’s an edited and translated excerpt from that conversation.

Why write about WhatsApp now?

In the middle of last year, I thought, “I’m doing so much communication from this one place on my phone.” I talk to my mother like this. I do all my children’s schoolwork from this. I do my work from this.

British politics, which I write about for the magazine, is largely conducted on WhatsApp. And you’re starting to see businesses on WhatsApp now.

You can even ‘check-in’ for your flight on some versions of WhatsApp. All of this happened in a relatively short period of time. And I thought, I don’t know how this works. I don’t know much about this app.

I have to admit that as an American, I don’t use WhatsApp every day. And I wonder why it’s not as popular in the US as it is in other parts of the world?

The US is kind of an outlier in terms of smartphone ownership. About 75 percent of people on WhatsApp are Android users and 25 percent are on iPhones.

And that reflects smartphone ownership around the world. The US is the exception: about 60 percent of people have an iPhone. But that’s changing, and WhatsApp is growing very quickly in the US.

It surpassed 100 million monthly users in the US last year. It’s coming your way. Don’t worry.

Well, I’m calling you on WhatsApp right now, so it’s clearly working.

Yes.

You brought up this interesting concept of phatic communion, which applies particularly well to WhatsApp. What does it mean?

I wanted to understand why WhatsApp encourages a kind of emotional closeness? It has a very welcoming feel to it, with all its stickers and emojis.

While reading about all this, I came across the term phatic communion, which refers to the act of people simply making their presence known when they’re talking to each other without actually saying anything. They’re just acknowledging, “I’m here.”

WhatsApp is great at giving that kind of presence – like little typing indicators and last-seen indicators. It shows that your friend or partner or family member is on their device at the same time as you are. Other than that, it doesn’t really mean much.

And it felt like a really important part of online behavior. We’re constantly in touch now. And, especially in family WhatsApp groups, it’s really amazing.

One person I spoke to said it felt like the 19th century again, like the whole family was back in the same house. WhatsApp is great at being a kind of home for that.

WhatsApp has changed a lot since its inception. Messaging remains its primary use, though. It has also recently started offering advertising and other features. How much of an impact has being owned by Meta had on that?

If you talk to people outside of Meta, there’s a clear perception that WhatsApp is increasingly focused on the interests of corporations and people who are paying to use the platform. It’s following Meta’s clear strategy of adding ads and monetizing it, like Facebook and Instagram.

If you talk to Meta, they argue that what people want is happening. People want to communicate with businesses.

Millions of businesses were already using it. They’ve added a commercial platform just to do that. However, they also say that people don’t have to go there. Users can still have private conversations with their friends and family.

So, what’s next for WhatsApp? Has it reached its peak?

I don’t think Meta sees it that way. Despite being one of the biggest apps in the world, WhatsApp’s revenue is negligible. I think Meta will monetize it heavily. And Meta is really excited about AI in WhatsApp. Because it inserts Meta AI into your chats. Apparently it's optional, but you can't turn it off.

So I'm not sure what 'optional' means. I think the company is just really excited about the amount of data and traffic. This is a concept where three billion users all chat and train Meta AI. It's pretty amazing.