"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 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."
WhatsApp reaches more than three billion monthly users and has more users than YouTube and roughly the same number as Facebook. The app was founded in 2009 and was engineered to run well on BlackBerrys, Nokias, Windows phones, and iPhones, enabling cross-device and cross-border communication. Jan Koum and Brian Acton sold WhatsApp to Meta in 2014, after which the platform continued rapid growth. The service is used for personal, family, political, and business communication, including flight check-in features in some versions. Global device distribution skews toward Android (about 75 percent), while the U.S. has higher iPhone ownership, making it initially an outlier but now showing fast WhatsApp adoption.
Read at The New Yorker
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