Whatsapp is celebrating its birthday and consolidating itself as the most popular “app”.

Chatting platform WhatsApp turns 15 this Saturday, consolidating as the world's most popular communication tool. 2 billion users Using its free and encrypted service, it complicates its profits precisely.

The instant messaging app was created on February 24, 2009 by two former employees Yahoo, John Koum and Brian ActonAnd in 2014 it became part of what is now Meta, whose founder, Mark ZuckerbergFor about 19,000 million dollars.

According to a recent study Social websites of IAB Spain (2023), Share it It continues to reign as the most valuable app of its kind, used frequently – several times a day – and with the highest intensity, and the most intersectional, as it is a favorite of the Millennial, Zeta and Alpha generations. .

WhatsApp's 2,000 million users worldwide pale in comparison to messaging rivals such as China's WeChat (1,336 million), Facebook Messenger (979 million) and Telegram (800 million), according to website Statista.

'Usage' includes increasingly complex innovations: video calls or voice notes, now basic, the possibility to create groups and now leave them undiscovered by all members. Its latest innovation is to allow you to edit messages that have already been sent.

As expected, artificial intelligence (AI) has already made its way into messages, although they are anecdotal due to their personal nature: users can use the technology to create emoticons, images and chat with an assistant “within limits”.

“AIs can read what's sent to them, but your private messages are encrypted end-to-end so no one, including Meta, can see them,” the company says on its website, though it expects to make the technology available. of developers and companies, one of its veins.

And since 2018, the 'app' has provided a WhatsApp business platform for corporate communication, with around 200 million users willing to pay cents for every conversation with their customers, and this seems to be a solution to the profitability problem.

Meta did not break down WhatsApp's business volume, which some analysts put at about 1% of the total, and prefers to refer to its “family of apps,” which includes Instagram and Facebook, a large advertising business, and more. By 2023 they had a combined revenue of 133,000 million.

According to specialized media, the app's potential monetization was one of the reasons why its founders left Meta a few years after Zuckerberg's purchase, as they criticized people for not wanting to see ads while talking to their friends and family.

According to data from Insider Intelligence collected by CNBC, WhatsApp's highest country penetration occurs in Spain, Italy and Argentina, although other pages point to countries such as Brazil and India. Where it is less popular in the US, the classic telephone text message (SMS) prevails.