WhatsApp is one of the biggest names among thepopular instant messaging apps on Android. What started out as the realization of a pipe dream for Brian Acton and Jan Koum in 2009 became a formidable and free-to-use rival for conventional SMS and email. WhatsApp began life as a standard instant messaging app, but on July 19, 2025, social media titan Meta, then known as Facebook, acquired the company outright. This month marks 10 years of the landmark acquisition, so we are looking back at how the change in ownership benefited the brand and shaped the business through tumultuous times and amid ever-growing competition.
Off to a concerning start
It wasn’t always smooth sailing
Meta acquired WhatsAppfor a whopping $19 billion in 2014, and today, over a third of the world’s population uses the app. Meta allowed WhatsApp to keep its branding, but the biggest oddity in its new ways has to be the monetization policy. At one point, Meta demanded $1 from every user when they downloaded the app, and another $1 for every year they used it. The companyquickly scrappedthis conventional subscription model in 2016 and allowed everyone to use the app for free thereafter, except business accounts, which paid a small recurring fee for benefits such as support for more linked devices and an in-app store.
WhatsApp’s subscription fee
Meanwhile, a significant fraction of users was concerned about the new owner’s mixed reputation for upholding user privacy. In 2021, this devil reared its ugly head when WhatsApp changed its Terms of Service (ToS), forcing people to consent to processing of personal data if they wanted to use the service, perhaps monetizing said data by acting as a broker. This move triggered a strong backlash from users, and the Irish Data Privacy Commissioner (DPC) evenfined Metaa whopping 225 million euros for user privacy violations, forcing the company to dial back its changes. As a result, the app remains devoid of ads (another popular revenue stream) while businesses pay Meta for data about customer interactions on WhatsApp.
Staying alive in a competitive landscape
Mixed signals fueled stiff competition
Meta’s benevolence may have kept WhatsApp alive, but it regularly plonked the company in regulatory hot water and faced allegations of data breaches, which rocked WhatsApp’s boat a fair bit. Around this time, Brian Acton’s non-profit Signal messenger started gaining popularity and droves of WhatsApp users flocked to it, like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Signal offers very similar features to WhatsApp, starting with support for messaging, group chats, voice calls, and video calls.
Facing such stiff competition, WhatsApp launched many new features, but not before we saw them on rival apps. Meta’s immense resources may have ensured users have all the necessary features for efficient communication, even if that meant following in the footsteps of competing apps like Telegram. Support for sticker packs, video messaging, screen sharing in video calls, and polling features in group chats were all copied in a quest to stay relevant to billions of users.
On the bright side, WhatsApp has been quick to pick up well-received social features seen on other Meta properties, like status updates which resemble stories from Instagram and Messenger-inspired Emoji reactions to messages. More recently, WhatsApp has added support for view-once messages and media, channels for broadcast messaging, and communities for Discord-style large group management. Current developments in the beta channel suggest Meta is now working to integrate and interlink its services, so users canshare WhatsApp status updates to Instagramwith a single tap once their accounts are linked.
Major maintenance and regular upkeep
Without Meta, WhatsApp wouldn’t even be a shadow of its current self
Although WhatsApp’s image has taken a few hits under Meta ownership, the app has surprisingly retained the simple, reliable, and bug-free experience users appreciated in the early days. Meta’s resources have been instrumental in significant feature overhauls over the years, like when it introduced tabs for status updates, or upped the group call participant limit to rival Zoom and Google Meet in the midst of a raging pandemic.
However, the best example of Meta’s involvement benefiting WhatsApp is the ground-up restructuring of themulti-device infrastructure. The system started out with support for a primary phone, WhatsApp Web, and a handful of linked devices, provided you didn’t link another phone or iPad. Moreover, the primary phone had to stay online for any of the linked devices to work. Meta’s restructuring allowed each device to communicate with WhatsApp servers independently, eliminating issues when the primary phone goes offline. Additionally, the current infrastructure allows linking one account with up to four other devices — phones and tablets included.
WhatsApp linked device infrastructure before and after the revamp
While such changes may not have been possible without Meta’s considerable resources, there’s no denying WhatsApp’s inability to conceptualize new features we haven’t seen before. There’s also anappalling lack of feature paritybetween the apps on different operating systems. After 10 years under Meta ownership, we are happy to see the soul is intact, but there is stillample room for improvementon many fronts. So long as ToS oopsies and dangerous data breaches don’t seal WhatsApp’s fate, we should be in for another decade of exciting developments, possibly withAI leading the charge.
