In other middle-income countries, at least half of adults use WhatsApp for communication, Pew Research Center data found.
US-based users were previously immigrants or families with international connections. In the years since the pandemic, Americans have traveled abroad at record rates, which may have led to more encounters with people who primarily use WhatsApp to communicate. Survey data collected by Morning Consult in May and June also revealed that WhatsApp is popular among affluent US shoppers: 37% of luxury buyers use the service, compared with 23% of the US population.
Founded in 2009 and acquired by Meta in 2014, WhatsApp remained primarily on devices until 2019, when the parent company began to focus more on its potential. Part of that included supporting businesses using the platform for marketing and customer service purposes. In 2022, the company rolled out a feature that lets users buy goods directly within the app. Meta also lets businesses connect their sales software to WhatsApp to use it as an instant messaging service similar to an SMS marketing service.
WhatsApp gained popularity globally because it was a free alternative to paid SMS and MMS plans offered by mobile phone carriers, which can be expensive depending on the volume of messages you send. In the United States, most mobile phone plans have bundled unlimited text messaging for at least the past decade. But WhatsApp also offers advanced cross-platform messaging features that could help it gain wider acceptance among U.S. smartphone owners who are tired of their own built-in messaging apps.
For example, WhatsApp has benefited from Apple's previous practice of punishing iPhone users for messaging Android users via its built-in messaging app, iMessage. The company has ignored the painful experience of sending and receiving heavily pixelated photos and videos, and sending group messages with Android users, but court documents recently revealed that this was a business decision to keep users from leaving the Apple ecosystem.
WhatsApp offers a third option for users tired of these shortcomings, allowing encrypted online instant messaging, group messaging, and high-definition media sharing, using your phone number as a personal identifier just like the built-in messaging app does. The latest iOS 18 update finally aims to address some of these long-standing issues, but so far the update has received mixed reviews, so WhatsApp may still be the best messaging option for those who communicate across different devices.
As Meta continues to add new features to the app that Zuckerberg called “the private social platform of the future,” more Americans should be on the lookout for green bubble texts from friends and family asking them to move their conversations to WhatsApp.
Story editing by Carren Jao. Additional editing by Kelly Glass. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.
This story originally appeared on Collabstr, produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.