In other middle-income countries, Pew data suggests that at least half of adults use WhatsApp to communicate.
U.S.-based users were previously immigrants and families with international ties. As Americans made record-breaking trips abroad in the years following the pandemic, they may have encountered more people who primarily use WhatsApp to communicate. Survey data collected in May and June by Morning Consult also showed that WhatsApp is commonly used by wealthier shoppers in the U.S.: 37% of luxury shoppers used the service, compared to 23% of all Americans.
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 and acquired by Meta in 2014. Until 2019, WhatsApp was largely left to its own devices until its parent company began to focus more on its potential, including supporting businesses that use its platform for marketing and customer service purposes. The company introduced features in 2022 that allow users to buy things directly in the app. Meta also allows businesses to connect their sales software to WhatsApp to act as an instant messaging service similar to SMS marketing services.
WhatsApp’s global popularity was based on the fact that it offered a free alternative to phone carriers’ paid SMS and MMS plans, which can get expensive depending on the volume of messages sent. In the US, unlimited texting has been a staple of most phone plans for at least a decade. But WhatsApp also offers enhanced, cross-platform messaging functionality that could find wider acceptance among American smartphone owners who are tired of their proprietary, built-in messaging apps.
For example, WhatsApp has benefited from Apple’s history of penalizing iPhone users who sent messages to Android users through its built-in messaging app, iMessage. The company has ignored the tedious experience of sending and receiving ultra-pixelated images and videos or attempting to send group messages with Android users. As court documents recently revealed, this was a business decision aimed at discouraging users from leaving the Apple product ecosystem.
WhatsApp offered a third option to users fed up with these drawbacks: encrypted online instant messaging, group messaging, and sharing high-resolution media using a phone number as a personal identifier – just like built-in messaging apps. The latest iOS 18 update is finally supposed to fix some of these long-standing issues. However, the update’s lukewarm reviews so far could mean that WhatsApp is still the best messaging option for people communicating between different devices.
As Meta continues to develop new features for the app, which Zuckerberg has called “the private social platform of the future,” more Americans should look out for the green text bubble in which a friend or family member asks them to move the conversation to WhatsApp.
Story copyediting by Carren Jao. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Proofreading by Kristen Wegrzyn.
This story originally appeared on Collabstr and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
