WhatsApp is No. 32 on the list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2024. Explore the full list of companies that are reshaping industries and culture.
If you have always lived in the United States, you probably know WhatsApp as a way to text people overseas. But elsewhere in the world, WhatsApp has become a standard replacement for SMS—and the method by which someone might contact their hairdresser, book a dinner reservation, or video chat with friends.
But with a slew of new features, WhatsApp has been making inroads at home‚ and the U.S. is now the company’s fastest-growing market. The company has said that than half of Americans aged 18 to 35 have WhatsApp installed, with usage particularly taking off in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
Some features focus on privacy, such as a “chat lock” function that requires biometric access or a passcode to view certain conversations, which are also stored in a separate folder, and security codes for verifying end-to-end encryption.
Other changes have made WhatsApp even more social, such as the addition of “communities,” a group chatting tool that allows people to gather around specific topics without sharing their phone number with users other than administrators and their contacts. “Channels,” the most distinct new feature, allows creators to message thousands of users while maintaining those users’ anonymity. The phone numbers of channel followers are kept private, and WhatsApp deliberately avoided features that would have allowed Channel users to chat with each other or respond to posts.
The most intriguing aspect of WhatsApp’s business strategy, however, involves decisions the company has made to avoid relying on network effects for growth and instead capitalize on the increasingly fragmented way users, and particularly young users, organize their lives online—a trend Fast Company noticed across applications.
Gen Z, in particular, doesn’t like to be told how to use their social media, nor do they like to constantly broadcast what they’re doing to the masses, as sociologists and advertisers have found. Instead, they tend to categorize their activity into different chats, and use apps for distinct purposes—one app for sharing photos, another for private messaging, another for dating—and customize those features in ways social media hasn’t previously supported. WhatsApp has responded by forgoing the things that make social media feel too big, such as contact suggestions and algorithmically targeted feeds sourced from the masses, and allowing users to keep their messaging about different topics separate and private.
“The user will always be in control of the content that they see—there’s no feed or algorithm recommending content to you,” explains Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp. “Your chat just shows the messages people sent you. The ‘updates’ tab just shows statuses from people in your phonebook and the Channels that you’ve chosen to follow. So you can keep using the core chat features or, as we introduce more features, you can take advantage of them.”
It’s a remarkable thing for a tech product developer to say—that minimal engagement with the tech is just fine—and precisely what younger users want to hear.
Explore the full 2024 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 606 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, artificial intelligence, design, sustainability, and more.