How WhatsApp Took Over the Global Conversation

My sister created a family WhatsApp group, for relatives on both sides of the Atlantic, on July 8, 2017. By then, I was using the app for work. British politics and, arguably, the British state are coördinated by WhatsApp. Ninety-two per cent of U.K. internet users are on the platform. Police officers banter on it. The National Health Service relies on it. On the afternoon of March 13, 2020—ten days before the U.K. entered its first COVID lockdown—Dominic Cummings, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, formed a five-man WhatsApp group that came to more or less run the country.

That fall, a reporter from the Daily Mail asked a government spokesperson, via WhatsApp, whether it was true that national policies were being conceived this way. The spokesperson WhatsApped Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, with a suggested response: “the PM does not make government decisions via WhatsApp.” Case replied on WhatsApp less than a minute later: “Erm—is that true? I am not sure it is. I think we will have to ignore.”

Koum grew up in a village outside Kyiv. He moved to California with his mother in the early nineties, when he was sixteen. His father, who worked in construction, stayed in Ukraine. “To instant-message my dad then would have been something,” he told an interviewer. His mother had cancer, and she and Koum lived on welfare for a while. In high school, Koum read “TCP/IP Illustrated,” by W. Richard Stevens, a six-hundred-page guide to the protocols of the internet. Then he read it again.

When WhatsApp was up and running, Koum was joined by Brian Acton, a former colleague at Yahoo, who became his co-founder. They wrote the software in Erlang, a programming language developed in the eighties by computer scientists at the Swedish telecom company Ericsson. The aim was for WhatsApp to work better than cellphone text messaging—short-message service (S.M.S.)—which was taking off in the U.S., years after it had become popular in Europe and Japan. S.M.S. was lucrative for telecom companies, worth around a hundred billion dollars a year. But it was a mediocre product. You were limited to a hundred and sixty characters. Longer messages were broken up and sometimes delivered out of turn. Sending photos—especially to different brands of phones—was a gamble. Koum visited Europe often and understood how much people liked texting and how frequently the technology fell short. “You would have to call the person the next day and be, like, ‘Hey, did you get my S.M.S.?’ And half of the time the answer would be no,” Koum said. “The message was just dropped on the floor.”

The idea with WhatsApp was that it would feel like you had used it before. The logo was a combination of the iPhone’s dialer and messaging icons, against a vivid green that was just a shade or two darker than Apple’s. “We wanted it to look good next to the native phone,” Anton Borzov, WhatsApp’s first designer, explained. Borzov ran a small studio, called Tokyo, in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. From the outset, Koum and Acton paid attention to populations in emerging markets. They hired Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian, and Spanish speakers, to make local-language versions of the app for Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico.

They built WhatsApp not just for iPhones but also for the BlackBerrys and Windows phones and Nokias that were common in Africa and South Asia. Engineers and designers assigned to WhatsApp’s various versions had to use those devices for their personal communication, to be alert to glitches and problems on the network. Chris Peiffer, the company’s first full-time U.S. employee, recalls being issued a bright-pink Nokia that was popular among Indonesian teen-agers. “We just really prided ourselves on: No, we’re going to make this work,” he said. “The messages are going to get through.”

“Cuffs? I don’t know who you are with cuffs.”

Cartoon by Michael Maslin

Koum loathed surveillance, which he grew up with in the U.S.S.R., and advertising, which he grew up mostly without. He kept a pair of walkie-talkies on his desk, to remind him of the simplicity of what he was trying to create, alongside a note written by Acton: “No ads! No games! No gimmicks!” When Koum thought of a person’s online connections, he pictured his grandfather, in Ukraine, leafing through his address book. “That’s the most intimate social network,” he said. “And it’s already there on your phone.” WhatsApp had no avatars or pins or passwords. Your online identity was yourself. During 2011, the number of users rose from ten million to a hundred million. New Year’s Eve was the busiest day of the year, as a rolling wave of midnights—through Jakarta and Delhi and Rio—hit the servers. In the spring of 2014, when the app had five hundred million users and a staff of about fifty, Koum and Acton agreed to sell WhatsApp to Facebook, for nineteen billion dollars. Koum signed the paperwork against the wall of the social-services office in Mountain View.

In the fall of 1914, Bronisław Malinowski, a young Polish ethnographer, began to study island communities off the coast of Papua New Guinea. “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away,” he wrote in the opening pages of “Argonauts of the Western Pacific,” an early classic of social anthropology, published in 1922. Malinowski intended to explain “the imponderabilia of actual life” on islands. Central among the imponderabilia of “Argonauts” was the kula, a circular form of trade—of necklaces and armbands, made from shells—that took place among the Trobriand Islands.

Malinowski spent a lot of time thinking about language. In an essay from 1923, he observed that much of what people say—whether on the Trobriand Islands or in European drawing rooms—was devoid of any obvious meaning. Saying “Ah, here you are!” in Kraków was the same as saying “Whenst comest thou?” on Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriands. It was about conveying sociability, rather than thoughts or ideas. Malinowski called this “phatic communion,” and he believed that it was essential to human society. It expressed “the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man.”