WhatsApp Is A Lot More Than A Messaging App Now
If you live in the United States, you might be shocked to discover that WhatsApp is the biggest messaging app in the world, since Facebook Messenger takes that crown on a national level. But yep, WhatsApp is huge globally, by a huge margin, and with so many users, it isn’t surprising that Meta does what they can to make the app beefier.
I’ve been using WhatsApp for over 10 years at this point, since my very first Android device, and I’ve been privileged to see it go through different major changes. In 2013, voice notes were introduced to the app; in 2015, voice calls became a thing; and a year after, video calls came in to make the messaging app beefier.
However, the first signs of a social experience started to show in 2017 when WhatsApp introduced the “Status” feature to rival Snapchat and Stories on Facebook and Instagram. Group chat capacity was doubled to 1024 people in 2022 — that’s more of a community than a group!
Finally, most recently — in June 2023 — the Channels feature came into the picture. If you ask me, this is the biggest social change thus far. It gives official organizations, celebrities, brands, and other entities, the ability to send out updates and messages to followers.
In a few years, we wouldn’t be surprised to see more changes that flesh out the social aspect of the platform even further. And if you ask me, that’s not a bad thing.
New Changes Coming To The Status Interface
The Status interface is one of my favorite parts of WhatsApp, and even though I remember being rather averse to its introduction several years ago, it’s grown on me heavily. When I don’t have much action going on in the Chats section of the app, I can always find entertainment with my contacts’ Statuses.
WhatsApp has made a lot of changes to the Status interface over the years, especially last year, and thanks to WABetaInfo, we know a new one will be coming soon — bringing more similarities to Facebook, WhatsApp’s Meta sibling. This new update will arrange statuses horizontally instead of vertically, providing a rectangular thumbnail for the first unviewed status of each of your contacts.
This means you don’t need to open status updates if you see something you’re not interested in, and I’m a big fan of that!
A Brief History Of WhatsApp
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum. It was created as an app for the iPhone that would let people display statuses in the Contacts list. When push notifications were integrated into the app, letting status updates be sent to contacts even when they weren’t currently in the app, users began to use it as a form of simplified instant messaging. The natural progression seemed obvious.
In late 2009, WhatsApp launched for iPhone with a proper messaging interface, and the number of active users blew up from there. It came to Android about a year later. In 2013, the app became free for the first year, with an annual $1 fee for each subsequent year, though the company eventually walked back on the annual fee in 2016.
In 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a whopping $19bn, and the rest, as they say, is history.
