WhatsApp Reaches 100 Million Users in US

WhatsApp said that as of July, it has 100 million users in the United States.

“This milestone has been a long time coming and it proves that WhatsApp is the solution to the cross-platform divide in America,” the company said in a Thursday (July 25) blog post. “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.”

Worldwide, WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users in more than 180 countries, according to the company’s website.

The Meta-owned messaging and calling app enables users to send and receive text, photos, videos, documents, location and voice calls, per the site.

This milestone comes at a time when WhatsApp and parent company Meta have been rolling out new features and other offerings on the platform.

In June, PYMNTS reported that Meta was planning to introduce free artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on WhatsApp as part of its strategy to monetize messaging apps.

Meta has been actively working to monetize WhatsApp, which is the company’s largest app in terms of daily users but contributes only a small portion of Meta’s total revenue.

To address this, the company has introduced commerce and payment features on the app, including business messaging tools for customer service and marketing.

On June 6, WhatsApp introduced AI tools designed to help businesses use the app to sell products and services, with the AI answering questions commonly asked by shoppers, creating ads to run on the Meta-owned platforms Instagram or Facebook, and following up with customers to remind them that they left an item in their cart or offer them a discount on a purchase they have been considering.

In December 2023, Meta teamed up with India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an open network that makes digital commerce “platform neutral,” to help smaller merchants do business on WhatsApp.

Meta said at the time that the partnership is designed to “enable and educate small businesses in building seamless conversational buyer and seller experiences on WhatsApp through an ecosystem of our business and technical solution providers.”