How WhatsApp became the world’s default communication app
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.
