It’s been a long, hard, windy road but WhatsApp has finally reached 100 million monthly active users in the US. That market is notoriously enamored with Apple’s iMessage so this is quite the feat for WhatsApp – unlike ever other place in the world where WhatsApp is as dominant as iMessage is in the US, or more.
This information is official and comes straight from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The fastest-growing markets for WhatsApp in the US are Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle. The company is also saying it’s experienced “significant growth” in the South, with Texas having more than 10 million users.
This is the first time WhatsApp has revealed data like this, which makes us wonder why. We assume this is meant to reassure people in the US who are still reluctant to install WhatsApp that it’s okay, see, a lot of people are on here already. Will this help break Americans’ iMessage addiction? Probably not. But WhatsApp is definitely going to try, and keep trying.
It’s also probably not a coincidence that this “transparency” campaign comes a couple of months before iOS 18 gets released to the public, since that version of Apple’s mobile OS will support RCS, thus enabling high quality image and video sharing with Android phones directly through the Messages app. That might impact WhatsApp’s further growth in the US.
