Mark Zuckerberg says there are now 100 million WhatsApp users in the USA. That’s a major milestone.
Traditionally, Americans were never fans of WhatsApp. Being predominantly iPhone-dominated territory, iMessage has been the preferred instant messaging app in the US. So, while the Meta-owned instant messaging app ramped up huge numbers elsewhere, its initial adoption in the United States was abysmal. But that looks to be changing.
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg shared via his WhatsApp channel a one-line announcement that there are now 100 million WhatsApp users in the USA. That is big news. For context, the population of the United States as at 26th of July 2024 is 342 million. About 300 million of them own a smartphone.
This means that one third of Americans now use WhatsApp messenger. That’s massive. Finally, WhatsApp is gaining traction in God’s own country.
About half of all smartphone users in the US are iPhone users. That’s about 150 million users. Not all of them use iMessage, so iMessage does not have 150 million users there. As a matter of sct, Statista says that only 26% of iPhone users are iMessagers. That sounds off; I’d have expected the share of iMessage users to be higher.
If Statista’s figures are accurate, then there were only 39 million iMessage users in the US in 2022. Interesting. Even if we generously assume that the number has grown to 50 million now in 2024, WhatsApp Messenger has twice that number now.
If we assume, again generously, that all iPhone users in the United States use iMessage, then we can peg the number of iMessage users in the country in 2024 to about 150 million. The fact that WhatsApp has clocked 100 million users means that it is catching up fast and will likely overtake iMessage soon.
It looks like WhatsApp is on the path to winning the instant messaging war in the US, however we slice things.
References
Share of smartphone users that use an Apple iPhone in the United States from 2014 to 2022: source.