WhatsApp Confirms Biggest iPhone Update Of 2024—Watch Out iMessage

Revenge is sweet, whether served cold or otherwise. And you can just imagine the smug grin on Mark Zuckerberg’s face as he hit send on his latest assault on Apple’s seemingly impenetrable US iPhone fortress. But you know what they say about pride—and for Meta, this update might just have a sting in its tail.

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“Today we have some exciting news to share,” WhatsApp posted on Thursday. “As of this month, WhatsApp now has 100 million users in the United States.” WhatsApp’s US user base is cross-platform, but Apple’s US market dominance across WhatsApp’s core demographics makes this all about iPhone. Breaking Apple’s lock on that market has been high on Zuckerberg’s agenda for years—this news is hugely significant.

As I’ve said before, the US is iMessage’s last standout against WhatsApp. This is the prize market that would really cement the global number one slot for Meta’s mega-messenger. But while the usual network effect and blue-bubble/green-bubble nonsense has carried the day for WhatsApp thus far, there’s now the little matter of iOS 18 and the introduction of RCS to contend.

Earlier in the year I suggested that in the build-up to iOS 18 we’d see a full-on campaign from WhatsApp—in the US particularly—to push its cross-platform security as a preemptive strike against RCS. This was always going to focus on RCS not end-to-end encrypting messages between iPhones and Androids.

And that’s exactly what we’ve now seen.

From billboards in Manhattan to reassembling the cast of Modern Family around a group WhatsApp chat, the point—as echoed in WhatsApp’s latest release—has been crystal clear. “No matter if you have an iPhone or Android, people want private and secure messaging that works well for everyone and that’s what we do best.”

Some karma maybe for Apple, taking this hit on security just after it issued it own headline attack on Chrome for not securing users as well it at could.

WhatsApp promotes its end-to-end security above all else, its privacy-first credentials define its mission. And while iMessage got there first, WhatsApp got there better, cross-platform. Google also end-to-end encrypts its own Messages, now the Android default, but the two encryption protocols will not extend cross-platform.

And so to the sting in the tail. For the first time in years, we have just seen a slight wobble in the sanctity of WhatsApp’s security optics. Whether Elon Musk suggesting his metadata is exported nightly or criticisms of WhatsApp’s approach to desktop companion apps, the crux was the same—there are no perfect solutions. And when the latter of those issues also hit uber-secure Signal, that message really resonated.

That sting has a part-two. WhatsApp’s security attack on iMessage only works if it can’t fully encrypt cross-platform. But Android Authority has just reported “a small change in Google Messages that might hint at RCS formalizing support for an important end-to-end encryption (E2EE) system.” This is Messaging Layer Security (MLS) and would only secure group chats, but it would represent a step in the right direction and would concur with Apple’s suggestion last year that it would support an industry-wide RCS protocol update to fully secure messaging traffic.

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This is what users need—there’s little point in replacing SMS and not widening the same security enjoyed by both Google and Apple users within their walled gardens. Not doing so plays into WhatsApp’s hands and leaves the status quo broadly in place.

So we now have the messaging battle we predicted would hit the build-up to iOS 18 as soon as Apple confirmed RCS last year. We don’t know yet if WhatsApp’s network effect is robust enough to withstand Apple and Google working together for the first time on cross-platform, stock messaging. But we will find out. And if there are some quick advances on cross-platform encryption, that will change the game completely.