alt Hacker News> over 3 billion people to message securely each and every day.
Whatsapp is a chat application with 3 billion daily active users.
For those of you in the US (where Whatsapp is seldom used), this is a fact worth remembering.
If you want to build products for the rest of the world, you need to know how those users think and breathe - and for 3 billion of them, Whatsapp is how they talk.
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Where I come from (Malawi, Africa), WhatsApp is so widespread that most people prefer it over email - to the extent that people don't really check their e-mails unless it's required for work or they are applying for something. For most people, WhatsApp is the de-facto communication channel.
I help moderate a community of developers and we hit the whatsapp group limit of 1024 members and sometimes have to wait for someone to leave (intentionally or accidentally) before we can add new members. We've tried to move people onto "better" platforms like Discord or Slack but we always end up coming back to WhatsApp which is subsidized via MNOs (mobile network operators) social media data/internet bundles and for the fact that most people are just stuck on whatsapp.
In markets where Whatsapp is entrenched, it’s already begun to enshittify.
They have ads and spam already (sorry, no-consent messages from businesses). This isn’t even new. [0]
There’s a clear pattern, say “we’ve rolled out strict policies”[1] and then… nothing changes on the ground, and TechCrunch writes another “they’ve fixed it” article a year later.[2]
Also their Communities feature has pretty crap UX.
Yes WhatsApp’s pervasive. But if pervasive was the end of the story, we’d all be using ICQ and AOL. The last thing any country needs is to hand over more of their lives to Facebook [sic].
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/10/in-india-businesses-are-in...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/20/whatsapp-will-finally-let-...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/whatsapp-will-curb-the-num...
Honestly? That claim seems a bit(read A LOT) exaggerated. I haven't had whatsapp in a decade and none of my friends(scattered all over Europe) or family uses it. Viber used to be a big deal and to an extent still is in some areas of Europe. Personally I think I've talked almost everyone into migrating to Signal.
Sure, but like with most things, maybe like 200 million max of them in NA/EU would actually bring in real money.
Doesn't this description describe Facebook itself? Should we make apps more like that as well? Because they could not be more polar opposite each other.
What one should do about this? I mean, beside working on lowering that number.
(Asking as a European who quite stubbornly refuses to install it - there are dozens of us. Dozens!)
Edit: please don't participate in making WhatsApp even more inescapable as it is today.