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How WhatsApp for business changed the world
WhatsApp is already the world’s most widely used messaging app. Meta wants it to be a lot more.
But perhaps most significantly, where Facebook struggled to adapt to the mobile era, WhatsApp, which launched in 2009, was a mobile-first product that had amassed roughly half a billion users in just five years — many of them in countries where several people’s first experience of the internet took place on a cellphone. Working out of an unmarked, converted garage in Mountain View, California, the engineering team was laser-focused on ensuring speed and reliability — whether a user was messaging from the latest iPhone in a major American city, or BlackBerrys and Nokia feature phones operating in the most remote places. As WhatsApp evolves, the company’s executives are keenly aware of the risk of turning the app into the junk drawer of the mobile era, overloaded with too many features and AI chatbots hawking products and driving away users.
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