WhatsApp sets its sights on the US

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

One of the most popular messaging apps in the world has more than 2 billion users. Outside of the US, its largest markets are. Facebook is hoping to change that by changing its name to Meta.

Meta is kicking off the first-ever US marketing push for WhatsApp, focusing on the privacy offered by the app. The first TV ad will show a person opening a physical mail and a person sending a message. Soon, similar ads will be on billboards around the country and online.

The goal of the marketing push is to get more people in the US to switch to WhatsApp by highlighting the app's security relative to other texting methods.

According to a study, there are more than 5 billion messages sent in the U.S. every day. Most of that volume is likely promotional messages, but a lot of them are sent using the default texting method for a lot of phones. RCS is a long-awaited upgrade to SMS that adds features like read receipts and is being pushed heavily by the internet giant. Apple doesn't seem to want to add RCS compatibility to iMessage. Green bubbles are not good.

Those who are frustrated by the experience of texting across platforms should look at the availability of the messaging service on both platforms. He says that the company is working on a way to easily sync your chat history between your phone and your device. Last year, the messaging service rolled out fully encrypted backups, something that Apple has yet to offer.

The fact that this marketing push is coming after the rebrand to Meta is convenient for WhatsApp, given how poorly Facebook's brand is perceived in the US and other parts of the world. The TV ad that is airing this weekend says that the app is not Facebook, and that it is from Meta. I'm still skeptical that the Meta rebrand was a factor in the timing of the US push.

In other countries, the new Meta distinction will be more helpful.

Over time, messaging apps tend to build strong network effects that can be difficult to compete with. The US has a lot of people who use apps likeSnapchat, and even Facebook's own Messenger. It is not clear if a marketing push will change that.

No plans for RCS support

He acknowledges that the move to encryption of messages is a good thing, but he doesn't think it's a good idea to add compatibility with RCS. Adding support would slow down the development of the messaging service, since it is an open standard. Before joining Meta, he was a part of the team that helped build the early spam filters for Gmail.

It would be very hard to add support for RCS, since we pride ourselves in the level of security and reliability. I will never say never. It's great to see that the service is getting better. One of the challenges with a system like that is that it can be hard to push the security and ease of use.

Photo by WABetaInfo

While it is primarily used for one-on-one messaging, it is working on additional features for larger groups to more easily communicate, potentially putting it in more direct competition with services like Discord. I asked about the feature that was spotted in the code called Communities. It seems geared towards expanding large group chats to include sub- groups and more admin controls. Groups of people like schools and religious groups are increasingly using the messaging service to communicate.

Is there a way to give admin control to help communities like that? It's an interesting area of product opportunity for us to make better, given how many people have started using it over the last couple of years.

The biggest challenge to cracking the US market will likely be the relationship with its parent company. A privacy policy update last year that clarified how chats with businesses onWhatsApp could be stored on Facebook's server, even though they are still encrypted during transit, was met with fierce backlash.

It's important that people are aware of privacy policies. There was a lot of confusion where people thought we were changing something about the privacy of their messages. That was not true.

Meta intends to introduce a new umbrella account system so that users can manage their identity across its products. It is part of a multi-year plan to integrate the messaging architecture of all of them so that users can communicate across them.

The introduction of opt-in, encrypted messaging on Messenger this week is an early step towards the apps being more connected. While staying largely independent from its parent company, the messaging service has flourished in large swaths of the world. It is a question of whether it can do the same in the US as it gets closer to the rest of Meta.