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The messaging app that competes with Facebook Messenger, iMessage and Snapchat said that it is working on new features for the months ahead.
Meta has announced that WhatsApp has reached 100m monthly active users in the US, which is nearly a third of smartphone users in the country.
In a blogpost published yesterday (25 July), WhatsApp confirmed that the messaging app reached the milestone this month as it continues its growth momentum in the market.
“This milestone has been a long time coming and it proves that WhatsApp is the solution to the cross-platform divide in America,” the blog reads. “No matter if you have an iPhone or Android, people want private and secure messaging that works well for everyone and that’s what we do best.”
One of the selling points of WhatsApp, other than the fact that it comes with no ads, is the fact that messages sent through the platform are end-to-end encrypted, meaning only the sender and receiver have access to messages and other content that is sent.
While the latest figure makes WhatsApp one of the top messaging service providers in the US, the market is not without competitors. Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat and iMessage are some of the other widely used app for messaging in the US.
End-to-end encryption
Meta brought end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger last year to give the platform the same level of privacy and security it extends to WhatsApp users.
The move came at a time when WhatsApp, Apple and Signal were opposing the UK’s Online Safety Bill that would have forced messaging services to compromise on end-to-end encryption.
First drafted in 2021, the UK Online Safety Bill, which became law last October, aimed to – among other things – crack down on the possession and sharing of child sex abuse material (CSAM) on privacy-focused messaging apps.
On a visit to the UK in March last year, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said the bill is in a legislative “grey area” that would make it impossible to comply without removing end-to-end encryption altogether.
During the final stages of the bill passing through parliament, the UK government admitted that no accredited technology in operation would allow the scanning for CSAM without infringing on people’s right to privacy and said that this measure in the bill would only be adopted when it was “technically feasible” to do so with more targeted tech.
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