Yahoo has bought Artifact, the news aggregation and recommendation app from Instagram’s co-founders. The app will no longer operate as a standalone service. Yahoo will fold Artifact's AI personalization tech and other features into products including Yahoo News in the coming months.
Terms of the deal, which closed last week, were not disclosed. Artifact founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger will advise Yahoo (Engadget’s parent company) during the transition.
“AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about,” Artifact CEO Systrom said in a press release. “Yahoo recognizes that opportunity, and we could not be more excited to see what we’ve built live on through Yahoo News.”
Artifact debuted in January last year and it picked up a bit of steam thanks to its solid discovery system that surfaced stories users by and large wanted to read (it delivered me a nice blend of gaming, breaking news and architecture stories). The app aimed to improve its personalized news feed over time. It did an effective job of that while incorporating other AI-powered features such as news summaries.
However, the app didn’t quite take off in the same way as Instagram. While the team behind it did add social features such as profiles, comment voting and so on, Artifact just didn’t find a big enough audience. Systrom and Krieger announced plans to shut down Artifact back in January, but the pair actually kept it running a while longer by themselves until selling it.
As it happens, Yahoo bought another app that used AI to summarize news, Summly, over a decade ago. Similarly, it shut down that app and folded the tech behind Summly into other products.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/yahoo-bought-ai-powered-news-app-artifact-from-instagrams-co-founders-140040172.html?src=rss
You know those folks who say they’d donate a major organ to own a fancy car? Ask them if they’d feel as comfortable sacrificing a rear window instead. Polestar’s newest ride has made its North American debut at the NY Auto Show and notably lacks a rear windshield. The rationale is rear passengers get better headroom and a more comfortable ride than in other cars. Drivers, meanwhile, get a high-res display where the rear-view mirror used to be, linked to a live feed from a rear-mounted camera. Given how often people’s heads or luggage obscure the backward view, it’s a trade I’m readily prepared to accept.
Gmail wasn’t the first service that turned its users into the product, but it’s probably the one we’re the most comfortable with. After all, while Facebook and its kin have been perpetually slammed for privacy issues, who really gets mad at Gmail? Our anniversary package has a deep dive into the last 20 years of Google’s flagship mail product.
For the uninitiated, Waffle House is a waffle-centric chain of 24/7 American diners with a reputation for random outbursts of violence. It’s apparently so well known that Tekken players have been petitioning the game’s director to add a Waffle House level. Sadly, it probably won’t happen because Waffle House stands accused of underpaying its workers and, given the above context, exposing them to an unsafe working environment.
You know those folks who say they’d donate a major organ to own a fancy car? Ask them if they’d feel as comfortable sacrificing a rear window instead. Polestar’s newest ride has made its North American debut at the NY Auto Show and notably lacks a rear windshield. The rationale is rear passengers get better headroom and a more comfortable ride than in other cars. Drivers, meanwhile, get a high-res display where the rear-view mirror used to be, linked to a live feed from a rear-mounted camera. Given how often people’s heads or luggage obscure the backward view, it’s a trade I’m readily prepared to accept.
Gmail wasn’t the first service that turned its users into the product, but it’s probably the one we’re the most comfortable with. After all, while Facebook and its kin have been perpetually slammed for privacy issues, who really gets mad at Gmail? Our anniversary package has a deep dive into the last 20 years of Google’s flagship mail product.
For the uninitiated, Waffle House is a waffle-centric chain of 24/7 American diners with a reputation for random outbursts of violence. It’s apparently so well known that Tekken players have been petitioning the game’s director to add a Waffle House level. Sadly, it probably won’t happen because Waffle House stands accused of underpaying its workers and, given the above context, exposing them to an unsafe working environment.
Think of Prelaunch.com as a ‘Shark Tank’ for ideas… but without hungry investors asking difficult questions. The world’s first ‘Market Validation’ platform was designed to help creators better understand what their designs needed to become million-dollar success stories – but now the website is launching an ‘Idea Validation’ feature that lets you understand if your idea has any potential. Thanks to a community panel of more than 200 million people, Prelaunch tests your concept in the marketplace of ideas to see whether it’s ready for the world, helping you fine-tune your design in its nascent stages, so you don’t end up spending all your money on R&D only to realize your product had a flaw, or was targeted at the wrong audience, or worse, was too ahead of its time.
Did you know Apple launched a game console in 1996 called the Pippin? Or that they also launched a touchscreen tablet with a stylus in 1992 called the Newton? How about the fact that Nintendo had its own VR headset back in 1995 called the Virtual Boy? Surely you knew about TwitterPeek, the microblogging platform’s first (and only) hardware device designed for only tweeting, which was launched back in 2008? Chances are you haven’t heard of these products for a good reason – they went as fast as they came, as the companies worked extremely hard to bury these massive failures. Some of these products weren’t well thought-out, others were just a little too early for their time. Most large companies can survive such setbacks… but smaller ones (like the startup Juicero that charged $400 for a device that simply squeezed bags of juice) usually collapse when their products fail. Prelaunch helps mitigate that possibility by allowing you to vet your ideas before you end up walking into a Shark Tank where you get shredded for your product, valuation, or sales. The Prelaunch website helps you get consumer feedback before you even get consumers, so you know whether an idea is worth spending hundreds of thousands (or potentially millions) of dollars into.
The “Idea Validation” feature steps away from the traditional, often tedious process of market research and surveys. Instead, it offers a streamlined, three-step approach for creators to bring their idea to life: describe your product, highlight its killer features, and then flesh out the specifications. The platform then harnesses the power of AI to generate a product landing page, complete with images and descriptions, in mere seconds. Prelaunch has integrated multiple survey panel providers, unified and standardized their processes, and as a result, now has access to 200 million people who are ready to give feedback.
Prelaunch’s entire process takes mere minutes, as opposed to the months (or even years) and financial capital it takes to develop a proof of concept.
Why is this revolutionary? Well, analysis from Prelaunch.com suggests that projects with prototypes stand a significantly better chance of validation and success. This new feature doesn’t just level the playing field; it virtually eliminates it, allowing creators with nothing more than a concept to compete with those who have tangible prototypes. The platform leverages the power of AI to help flesh out the idea, so it can be rapidly tested with a target audience to check for viability.
The platform offers the following metrics to creators:
Interest rate: Percent of visitors who liked the idea. It measures how many users clicked the ‘Like’ button or reacted positively to the webpage’s content. A higher rate implies greater audience engagement and appreciation for the content.
Survey completion rate: Percent of people who completed the survey out of all people who started the survey.
Saves rate: Percent of visitors who provided their email. It measures the number of users who chose to save the webpage for future reference, indicating an intent to revisit the content. A higher rate signifies greater user commitment and interest in the content compared to simply liking it.
Rating: Rating of the product from the “Rate this product” survey question.
Price: Average, Minimum, and Maximum results from survey questions like – “How much would you like to pay?”
Concept Idea Score: Calculated based on a formula that contains several components of interest rate, saves rate, etc.
Demographics: Data based on country, age, and gender.
For a limited time, Prelaunch.com is offering this feature for free—a gesture that speaks volumes about their commitment to nurturing creativity and innovation. Prelaunch CEO Narek Vardanyan’s vision is clear: to empower creators to bring their ideas to life by providing valuable feedback as early as possible.
On a lighter note, imagine if famous inventors and creators had access to something like the “Idea Validation” feature. Would Edison have had an easier time convincing people about the light bulb? Would Da Vinci have gotten immediate feedback on his flying machine designs? While we can’t rewrite history, Prelaunch.com is ensuring that the future of innovation is brighter, bolder, and validated by the very people it seeks to inspire. Welcome to the future of creation, where your next big idea doesn’t just have to be a dream.
US Congressional staff members can no longer use Microsoft's Copilot on their government-issued devices, according to Axios. The publication said it obtained a memo from House Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor, telling Congress personnel that the AI chatbot is now officially prohibited. Apparently, the Office of Cybersecurity has deemed Copilot to be a risk "due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services." While there's nothing stopping them from using Copilot on their own phones and laptops, it will now be blocked on all Windows devices owned by the Congress.
Almost a year ago, the Congress also set a strict limit on the use of ChatGPT, which is powered by OpenAI's large language models, just like Copilot. It banned staffers from using the chatbot's free version on House computers, but it allowed them to continue using the paid (ChatGPT Plus) version for research and evaluation due to its tighter privacy controls. More recently, the White House revealed rules federal agencies have to follow when it comes to generative AI, which would ensure that any tool they use "do not endanger the rights and safety" of Americans.
Microsoft told Axios that it does recognize government users' need for higher security requirements. Last year, it announced a roadmap of tools and services meant for government use, including an Azure OpenAI service for classified workloads and a new version of Microsoft 365's Copilot assistant. The company said that all those tools and services will feature higher levels of security that would make it more suitable for handling sensitive data. Szpindor's office, according to Axios, will evaluate the government version Copilot when it becomes available before deciding if it can be used on House devices.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-copilot-has-reportedly-been-blocked-on-all-congress-owned-devices-034946166.html?src=rss
US Congressional staff members can no longer use Microsoft's Copilot on their government-issued devices, according to Axios. The publication said it obtained a memo from House Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor, telling Congress personnel that the AI chatbot is now officially prohibited. Apparently, the Office of Cybersecurity has deemed Copilot to be a risk "due to the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services." While there's nothing stopping them from using Copilot on their own phones and laptops, it will now be blocked on all Windows devices owned by the Congress.
Almost a year ago, the Congress also set a strict limit on the use of ChatGPT, which is powered by OpenAI's large language models, just like Copilot. It banned staffers from using the chatbot's free version on House computers, but it allowed them to continue using the paid (ChatGPT Plus) version for research and evaluation due to its tighter privacy controls. More recently, the White House revealed rules federal agencies have to follow when it comes to generative AI, which would ensure that any tool they use "do not endanger the rights and safety" of Americans.
Microsoft told Axios that it does recognize government users' need for higher security requirements. Last year, it announced a roadmap of tools and services meant for government use, including an Azure OpenAI service for classified workloads and a new version of Microsoft 365's Copilot assistant. The company said that all those tools and services will feature higher levels of security that would make it more suitable for handling sensitive data. Szpindor's office, according to Axios, will evaluate the government version Copilot when it becomes available before deciding if it can be used on House devices.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-copilot-has-reportedly-been-blocked-on-all-congress-owned-devices-034946166.html?src=rss
An oddball new app called Palmsy lets you post to a social media network full of adoring followers who only exist in your imagination. Whether used as a journaling app with a fresh twist or a nicotine patch equivalent for social media addiction, Palmsy prevents the real world from ever seeing your “posts,” storing them on-device, offline and private.
Palmsy’s App Store description says it “lets you make little posts for yourself.” And, at its core, that’s all you’re doing. As for why you’d want to do such a thing, people who have trouble with typical journaling or mind-mapping apps may find it a more inspiring framework. Or, if your social posting habit has gotten out of hand (or you want a break from it for any other reason), it could serve as a way to wean yourself off and give you the dopamine hit without sharing anything publicly.
One clever wrinkle from developer Pat Nakajima is that the app imports your contacts to generate fake likes from them. As pointed out by TechCrunch, Nakajima wrote on Threads that nothing leaves your device or is posted to your contacts, the app’s servers or anywhere else. “It’s just pretend,” he clarified.
If seeing fake likes from real contacts feels a bit too weird, a recent update added the ability to limit the number of faux likes your posts get. You can also set caps on how long you receive them, ranging from a few seconds to a few days.
The app is free and iOS-only, including iPhone and iPad variants.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/journaling-app-palmsy-offers-fake-likes-from-real-friends-194059136.html?src=rss
An oddball new app called Palmsy lets you post to a social media network full of adoring followers who only exist in your imagination. Whether used as a journaling app with a fresh twist or a nicotine patch equivalent for social media addiction, Palmsy prevents the real world from ever seeing your “posts,” storing them on-device, offline and private.
Palmsy’s App Store description says it “lets you make little posts for yourself.” And, at its core, that’s all you’re doing. As for why you’d want to do such a thing, people who have trouble with typical journaling or mind-mapping apps may find it a more inspiring framework. Or, if your social posting habit has gotten out of hand (or you want a break from it for any other reason), it could serve as a way to wean yourself off and give you the dopamine hit without sharing anything publicly.
One clever wrinkle from developer Pat Nakajima is that the app imports your contacts to generate fake likes from them. As pointed out by TechCrunch, Nakajima wrote on Threads that nothing leaves your device or is posted to your contacts, the app’s servers or anywhere else. “It’s just pretend,” he clarified.
If seeing fake likes from real contacts feels a bit too weird, a recent update added the ability to limit the number of faux likes your posts get. You can also set caps on how long you receive them, ranging from a few seconds to a few days.
The app is free and iOS-only, including iPhone and iPad variants.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/journaling-app-palmsy-offers-fake-likes-from-real-friends-194059136.html?src=rss
In 2014, WIRED asked me to write a few lines about my most-used app as part of an internship application. I wrote about WhatsApp because it was a no-brainer. I was an international student from India, and it was my lifeline to my family and to my girlfriend, now my wife, who lived on the other side of the world. “This cross-platform messenger gets all the credit for my long-distance relationship of two years, which is still going strong,” I wrote in my application. “Skype is great, Google+ Hangouts are the best thing to have happened since Gmail but nothing says ‘I love you’ like a WhatsApp text message.”
A few months into that internship, Facebook announced it was buying WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion. In WIRED’s newsroom, there were audible gasps at this seemingly minor player's price tag. American journalists weren’t exactly unfamiliar with WhatsApp. But much of the country was still locked in a battle between green and blue bubbles, even as the rest of the world had switched to an app created by two former Yahoo! engineers in WIRED’s Mountain View backyard.
Text messaging was one of the few things you could do on WhatsApp in 2014. There were no emoji you could react with, no high-definition videos you could send, no GIFs or stickers, no read receipts until the end of that year and certainly no voice or video calling. And yet, more than 500 million people around the world were hooked, reveling in the freedom of using nascent cellular data to swap unlimited messages with friends and family instead of paying mobile carriers per text.
WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, launched the app in 2009 simply to display status messages next to people’s names in a phone’s contact book. But after Apple introduced push notifications on the iPhone later that year, it evolved into a full-blown messaging service. Now, 15 years later, WhatsApp has become a lot more — an integral part of the propaganda machinery of political parties in India and Brazil, a way for millions of businesses to reach customers, a way to send money to people and merchants, a distribution platform for publications, brands and influencers, a video conferencing system and a private social network for older adults. And it is still a great way for long-distance lovers to stay connected.
“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp, told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are no recommendations and no social graph.”
Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram, which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three billion users .
WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for the company.
Will Cathcart, a longtime Meta executive, who took over WhatsApp in 2019 after its original founders departed the company, credits WhatsApp’s early global growth to it being free (or nearly free — at one point, WhatsApp charged people $1 a year), running on almost any phone, including the world’s millions of low-end Android devices, reliably delivering messages even in large swathes of the planet with suboptimal network conditions and, most importantly, being dead simple, free of the bells and whistles that bloat most other messaging apps. In 2013, a year before Facebook acquired it, WhatsApp added the ability to send short audio messages.
“That was really powerful,” Cathcart told Engadget, “People who don’t have high rates of literacy or someone new to the internet could spin up WhatsApp, use it for the first time and understand it.”
In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, something Cathcart said was a huge selling point. The feature made WhatsApp a black box, hiding the contents of messages from everyone — even WhatsApp — except the sender and the receiver. The same year, WhatsApp announced that one billion people were using the service every month.
That explosive growth came with a huge flip side: As hundreds of millions of people in heavily populated regions, like Brazil and India, came online for the first time, thanks to inexpensive smartphone and data prices, WhatsApp became a conduit for hoaxes and misinformation to flow freely. In India, currently WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 700 million users, the app overflowed with propaganda and disinformation against opposition political parties, cheerleading Narendra Modi, the country’s nationalist Prime Minister accused of destroying its secular fabric.
Then people started dying. In 2017 and 2018, frenzied mobs in remote parts of the country high on baseless rumors about child abductors forwarded through WhatsApp, lynched nearly two dozen people in 13 separate incidents. In response to the crisis, WhatsApp swung into action. Among other things, it made significant product changes, such as clearly labeling forwarded messages — the primary way misformation spread across the service — as well as severely restricting the number of people and groups users could forward content to at the same time.
In Brazil, the app is widely seen as a key tool in the country’s former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 win. Bolsonaro, a far-right strongman, was accused of getting his supporters to circumvent WhatsApp’s spam controls to run elaborate misinformation campaigns, blasting thousands of WhatsApp messages attacking his opponent, Fernando Haddad.
Since these incidents, WhatsApp has established fact-checking partnerships with more than 50 fact-checking organizations globally (because WhatsApp is encrypted, fact-checkers depend on users reporting messages to their WhatsApp hotlines and respond with fact checks). It also made additional product changes, like letting users quickly Google a forwarded message to fact-check it within the app. “Over time, there might be more things we can do,” said Cathcart, including potentially using AI to help with WhatsApp’s fact-checking. “There’s a bunch of interesting things we could do there, I don’t think we’re done,” he said.
Recently, WhatsApp has rapidly added new features, such as the ability to share large files, messages that auto-destruct after they’re viewed, Instagram-like Stories (called Statuses) and larger group calls, among other things. But a brand new feature rolled out globally in fall 2023 called Channels points to WhatsApp’s ambitions to become more than a messaging app. WhatsApp described Channels, in a blog post announcing the launch, as “a one-way broadcast tool for admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls.” They’re a bit like a Twitter feed from brands, publishers and people you choose to follow. It has a dedicated tab in WhatsApp, although interaction with content is limited to responding with emoji — no replies. There are currently thousands of Channels on WhatsApp and 250-plus have more than a million followers each, WhatsApp told Engadget. They include Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (18.9 million followers), Narendra Modi (13.8 million followers), FC Barcelona (27.7 million followers) and the WWE (10.9 million followers). And even though it’s early days, Channels is fast becoming a way for publishers to distribute their content and build an audience.
“It took a year for us to grow to an audience of 35,000 on Telegram,” Rachel Banning-Lover, the head of social media and development at the Financial Times (155,000 followers) toldNieman Lab in November. “Comparatively, we [grew] a similar-sized following [on WhatsApp] in two weeks.”
WhatsApp’s success at consistently adding new functionality without succumbing to feature sprawl has allowed it to thrive, both with its core audience and also, more recently, with users in the US. According to data that analytics firm Data.ai shared with Engadget, WhatsApp had nearly 83 million users in the US in January 2024, compared to 80 million a year before. A couple of years ago, WhatsApp ran an advertising campaign in the US — its first in the country — where billboards and TV spots touted the app’s focus on privacy.
It’s a sentiment shared by Zuckerberg himself, who, in 2021, shared a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” on his Facebook page. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around,” he wrote. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”
Meta has now begun using WhatsApp’s sheer scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear so far how much money, if any, the app makes. “The business model we’re really excited about and one that we’ve been growing for a couple of years successfully is helping people talk to businesses on WhatsApp,” Cathcart said. “That’s a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. And it integrates the whole system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook that, when clicked, open directly to a WhatsApp chat with the business. These have become the fastest-growing ad format across Meta, the company told The New York Times.
A few years ago, a configuration change in Facebook’s internal network knocked multiple Facebook services, including WhatsApp, off the internet for more than six hours and ground the world to a halt.
“It’s like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. [WhatsApp] essentially functions as an unregulated utility,” journalist Aura Bogado reportedly wrote on X (then Twitter). In New Delhi and Brazil, gig workers were unable to reach customers and lost out on wages. In London, crypto trades stopped as traders were unable to communicate with clients. One firm claimed a drop of 15 percent. In Russia, oil markets were hit after traders were unable to get in touch with buyers in Europe and Asia placing orders.
Fifteen years after it was created, the messaging app now runs the world.
To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-whatsapp-became-the-worlds-default-communication-app-144520113.html?src=rss
In 2014, WIRED asked me to write a few lines about my most-used app as part of an internship application. I wrote about WhatsApp because it was a no-brainer. I was an international student from India, and it was my lifeline to my family and to my girlfriend, now my wife, who lived on the other side of the world. “This cross-platform messenger gets all the credit for my long-distance relationship of two years, which is still going strong,” I wrote in my application. “Skype is great, Google+ Hangouts are the best thing to have happened since Gmail but nothing says ‘I love you’ like a WhatsApp text message.”
A few months into that internship, Facebook announced it was buying WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion. In WIRED’s newsroom, there were audible gasps at this seemingly minor player's price tag. American journalists weren’t exactly unfamiliar with WhatsApp. But much of the country was still locked in a battle between green and blue bubbles, even as the rest of the world had switched to an app created by two former Yahoo! engineers in WIRED’s Mountain View backyard.
Text messaging was one of the few things you could do on WhatsApp in 2014. There were no emoji you could react with, no high-definition videos you could send, no GIFs or stickers, no read receipts until the end of that year and certainly no voice or video calling. And yet, more than 500 million people around the world were hooked, reveling in the freedom of using nascent cellular data to swap unlimited messages with friends and family instead of paying mobile carriers per text.
WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, launched the app in 2009 simply to display status messages next to people’s names in a phone’s contact book. But after Apple introduced push notifications on the iPhone later that year, it evolved into a full-blown messaging service. Now, 15 years later, WhatsApp has become a lot more — an integral part of the propaganda machinery of political parties in India and Brazil, a way for millions of businesses to reach customers, a way to send money to people and merchants, a distribution platform for publications, brands and influencers, a video conferencing system and a private social network for older adults. And it is still a great way for long-distance lovers to stay connected.
“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp, told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are no recommendations and no social graph.”
Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram, which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three billion users .
WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for the company.
Will Cathcart, a longtime Meta executive, who took over WhatsApp in 2019 after its original founders departed the company, credits WhatsApp’s early global growth to it being free (or nearly free — at one point, WhatsApp charged people $1 a year), running on almost any phone, including the world’s millions of low-end Android devices, reliably delivering messages even in large swathes of the planet with suboptimal network conditions and, most importantly, being dead simple, free of the bells and whistles that bloat most other messaging apps. In 2013, a year before Facebook acquired it, WhatsApp added the ability to send short audio messages.
“That was really powerful,” Cathcart told Engadget, “People who don’t have high rates of literacy or someone new to the internet could spin up WhatsApp, use it for the first time and understand it.”
In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, something Cathcart said was a huge selling point. The feature made WhatsApp a black box, hiding the contents of messages from everyone — even WhatsApp — except the sender and the receiver. The same year, WhatsApp announced that one billion people were using the service every month.
That explosive growth came with a huge flip side: As hundreds of millions of people in heavily populated regions, like Brazil and India, came online for the first time, thanks to inexpensive smartphone and data prices, WhatsApp became a conduit for hoaxes and misinformation to flow freely. In India, currently WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 700 million users, the app overflowed with propaganda and disinformation against opposition political parties, cheerleading Narendra Modi, the country’s nationalist Prime Minister accused of destroying its secular fabric.
Then people started dying. In 2017 and 2018, frenzied mobs in remote parts of the country high on baseless rumors about child abductors forwarded through WhatsApp, lynched nearly two dozen people in 13 separate incidents. In response to the crisis, WhatsApp swung into action. Among other things, it made significant product changes, such as clearly labeling forwarded messages — the primary way misformation spread across the service — as well as severely restricting the number of people and groups users could forward content to at the same time.
In Brazil, the app is widely seen as a key tool in the country’s former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 win. Bolsonaro, a far-right strongman, was accused of getting his supporters to circumvent WhatsApp’s spam controls to run elaborate misinformation campaigns, blasting thousands of WhatsApp messages attacking his opponent, Fernando Haddad.
Since these incidents, WhatsApp has established fact-checking partnerships with more than 50 fact-checking organizations globally (because WhatsApp is encrypted, fact-checkers depend on users reporting messages to their WhatsApp hotlines and respond with fact checks). It also made additional product changes, like letting users quickly Google a forwarded message to fact-check it within the app. “Over time, there might be more things we can do,” said Cathcart, including potentially using AI to help with WhatsApp’s fact-checking. “There’s a bunch of interesting things we could do there, I don’t think we’re done,” he said.
Recently, WhatsApp has rapidly added new features, such as the ability to share large files, messages that auto-destruct after they’re viewed, Instagram-like Stories (called Statuses) and larger group calls, among other things. But a brand new feature rolled out globally in fall 2023 called Channels points to WhatsApp’s ambitions to become more than a messaging app. WhatsApp described Channels, in a blog post announcing the launch, as “a one-way broadcast tool for admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls.” They’re a bit like a Twitter feed from brands, publishers and people you choose to follow. It has a dedicated tab in WhatsApp, although interaction with content is limited to responding with emoji — no replies. There are currently thousands of Channels on WhatsApp and 250-plus have more than a million followers each, WhatsApp told Engadget. They include Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (18.9 million followers), Narendra Modi (13.8 million followers), FC Barcelona (27.7 million followers) and the WWE (10.9 million followers). And even though it’s early days, Channels is fast becoming a way for publishers to distribute their content and build an audience.
“It took a year for us to grow to an audience of 35,000 on Telegram,” Rachel Banning-Lover, the head of social media and development at the Financial Times (155,000 followers) toldNieman Lab in November. “Comparatively, we [grew] a similar-sized following [on WhatsApp] in two weeks.”
WhatsApp’s success at consistently adding new functionality without succumbing to feature sprawl has allowed it to thrive, both with its core audience and also, more recently, with users in the US. According to data that analytics firm Data.ai shared with Engadget, WhatsApp had nearly 83 million users in the US in January 2024, compared to 80 million a year before. A couple of years ago, WhatsApp ran an advertising campaign in the US — its first in the country — where billboards and TV spots touted the app’s focus on privacy.
It’s a sentiment shared by Zuckerberg himself, who, in 2021, shared a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” on his Facebook page. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around,” he wrote. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”
Meta has now begun using WhatsApp’s sheer scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear so far how much money, if any, the app makes. “The business model we’re really excited about and one that we’ve been growing for a couple of years successfully is helping people talk to businesses on WhatsApp,” Cathcart said. “That’s a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. And it integrates the whole system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook that, when clicked, open directly to a WhatsApp chat with the business. These have become the fastest-growing ad format across Meta, the company told The New York Times.
A few years ago, a configuration change in Facebook’s internal network knocked multiple Facebook services, including WhatsApp, off the internet for more than six hours and ground the world to a halt.
“It’s like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. [WhatsApp] essentially functions as an unregulated utility,” journalist Aura Bogado reportedly wrote on X (then Twitter). In New Delhi and Brazil, gig workers were unable to reach customers and lost out on wages. In London, crypto trades stopped as traders were unable to communicate with clients. One firm claimed a drop of 15 percent. In Russia, oil markets were hit after traders were unable to get in touch with buyers in Europe and Asia placing orders.
Fifteen years after it was created, the messaging app now runs the world.
To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-whatsapp-became-the-worlds-default-communication-app-144520113.html?src=rss
