There’s no shortage of messaging apps out there. The past decade has given us more options than we know what to do with, largely because smartphones demanded something better than plain old SMS.

Both the App Store and the Play Store are packed with apps that promise to revolutionize the way we communicate. Most of them didn’t make it. The truth is, a messaging app is only as good as the number of people using it, and most apps never cross that threshold.

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WhatsApp seem to be one of the few chat apps that have crossed it. What began in early 2009 as a small project by two former Yahoo engineers to replace SMS struck a chord, acquiring a quarter-million users in its first year and growing to 400 million by the end of 2013.

Since its 2014 acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), WhatsApp has reached a point where it’s now become the de facto standard for cross-platform messaging worldwide, with over 5 billion installs from the Google Play Store and 3 billion active monthly users.

What is…