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“You guys are lucky. WhatsApp isn’t a big threat in the US,” a major CPaaS CEO recently told me. That might be changing. WhatsApp is trying to crack the US market by going straight at the second-most dominant messaging platform in the country, iMessage. SMS’s reach can’t be duplicated, but WhatsApp is betting that today’s texters are looking for boundless self-expression and big communities as a proxy for connection.
A Growing US Platform
The WSJ reports that WhatsApp’s US iOS usage is up 39% since 2020. The observation is that large groups are driving adoption. While iMessage caps at 32, WhatsApp supports 1,024. Weddings, church communities, sports teams, and neighborhood threads all follow the same pattern. Once a group grows beyond a manageable size, it stops functioning cleanly inside Apple’s inbox. WhatsApp is fast becoming the default for group messaging.
This Is Personal
I saw this firsthand during the Palisades Fire. Many neighborhoods, including my own, struggled to keep people in touch. What should have been one neighborhood thread split into five, each created automatically as new numbers were added. The noise slowed everything down at a moment when clarity mattered. WhatsApp solved it with an app and a link and overcame not being the default on the app tray. Those groups, including the one in my neighborhood that I manage, are still active thanks to the clusterfug government and insurance response that is requiring communities to keep sharing and supporting each other because no one else is.
The Product-Led Approach
You see the same behavior everywhere: Messaging today is a set of overlapping circles. Family, close friends, school parents, volunteer groups, and professional communities. The inner circle will stay on the OS default (iMessage on iOS and Android Messages on Android). There is no reason to expect otherwise. But the outer circle is choosing the tool that works for the widest audience. The outer circle cares about sharing rich messages reliably and at scale. That’s where WhatsApp is gaining ground.
Some might argue that the new RCS standard coming to the iPhone will solve this. But as I’ll explain later, while RCS is a bigger pipe it doesn’t solve the problem of large groups.
Finally
This is not a story about a sudden shift in US consumer behavior. It is a gradual, predictable adjustment shaped by group size and practical needs. When circles get larger, they migrate to the place that can hold them. Right now, that place is WhatsApp.
There are two ways for a messaging app to get device dominance. You can do it like the carriers did with SMS (and now RCS), Apple with iMessage, Google with Android Messages and make the app the “good default.” Or you can tap unfulfilled user desire and build for it better than anyone else.
The blue bubble isn’t breaking yet, but the Visigoths are finding creative ways to poke it.