More than three billion people use WhatsApp every month. The platform, which was founded in 2009, has more users than YouTube and roughly the same amount as Facebook. It is everywhere. And this is by design, as Sam Knight writes in an illuminating piece from this week’s issue. The platform’s co-founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, built it to work as well on BlackBerrys, Nokias, and Windows phones as it did on iPhones, and it quickly became a way for people to chat across devices and across countries.
In 2014, Koum and Acton sold the app to Meta (then Facebook), and WhatsApp has kept growing. I caught up with Knight to discuss why the app has surpassed other messaging and social-media platforms—and where it might be going next.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Why write about WhatsApp now?
In the middle of last year, I was, like, “Hold on, I am doing so much communicating from this one place on my phone.” This is how I talk to my mom. This is how I do everything that has to do with my kids at school. This is how I do my work. British politics, which I write about for the magazine, is largely carried out on WhatsApp. And you’re beginning to see businesses on WhatsApp, too. You can check in for your flight on versions of WhatsApp. This has all 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 at all.
I have to admit that, as an American, I don’t use WhatsApp every day. And I do wonder why the app hasn’t blown up in the States the same way as it has around the world.
The U.S. is a kind of outlier in terms of smartphone ownership. On WhatsApp, about seventy-five per cent of people are on Android devices, and twenty-five per cent of people are on iPhones. And that reflects smartphone ownership around the world. The U.S. is the exception: about sixty per cent of people own iPhones. But it’s changing, and WhatsApp is growing really fast in America. It exceeded a hundred million monthly users in America last year. It’s coming for you. Don’t worry.
Well, I am calling you on WhatsApp now, so clearly it’s working.
Yeah.
You introduce this interesting idea of “phatic communion” as something that applies well to WhatsApp, specifically. What does that mean?
I wanted to understand why WhatsApp encourages a kind of emotional squishiness. It just has a very welcoming feel to it—with all its stickers and emojis. While I was reading about all of this, I came across the term “phatic communion,” which describes what people do when they’re talking to each other but not really saying anything. They’re just kind of acknowledging, I’m here.
WhatsApp is brilliant at conveying that kind of presence—the little typing indicators and last-seen indicators. These things don’t mean anything except that your friend or partner or family member is on their device at the same time as you’re on yours. And that just felt like a really important part of online behavior. We’re in touch constantly now. And, particularly in family WhatsApp groups, it’s really amazing. One person I spoke to said that it feels like the nineteenth century again, as if whole families have moved back into the same house. WhatsApp is very good at being a kind of home for that.
WhatsApp has changed a lot since it was founded. Even though messaging remains its primary utility, it has recently introduced advertising and other functions. How much of it has to do with being owned by Meta?
If you speak to people outside Meta, there’s a fairly clear narrative that WhatsApp is increasingly geared to the interests of corporations and people who are paying to use the platform. It’s following a clear Meta playbook of adding advertising and being monetized in similar ways to Facebook and Instagram.
If you speak to Meta, they argue that this is just what people want. People want to communicate with businesses. Hundreds of millions of businesses were using it already. They’ve just added a business platform to do that. They also say, though, that people don’t have to go there. Users can just still do their private chatting 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 at all. For being one of the world’s largest apps, WhatsApp’s earnings are minuscule. I think Meta is going to monetize it hard. And Meta is really excited about A.I. on WhatsApp because it has slipped MetaAI into your chats. Apparently it’s optional, but you can’t turn it off. So I’m not really sure what “optional” means. I think the company is just really excited about the sheer volume of data and traffic. It’s the idea of three billion users all chatting to and training Meta A.I. It’s pretty nuts.
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