Your users are in San Francisco, Jakarta, São Paulo, and Sydney. They have WhatsApp open all day. They check it before they check their SMS inbox. When your app sends an OTP to their phone number, it lands in a carrier SMS thread they barely look at. When it lands in WhatsApp, they see it instantly.

In this article, you will learn:

Why WhatsApp OTP delivers better completion rates than SMS in high-penetration markets

How Kinde delivers phone OTPs via WhatsApp when configured, with automatic SMS fallback

What you need before you start: Twilio account, WhatsApp Sender, Kinde Pro

How to configure Twilio Verify with a WhatsApp Sender

How to connect your Twilio account to Kinde

How to enable phone authentication in your Next.js app

How to enable WhatsApp as the delivery channel in Kinde

How to configure SMS as the automatic fallback

How to test the full flow before going live

What to watch for in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia specifically

Let's dive in!

Why WhatsApp OTP Is the Right Choice…