The Rise of WhatsApp Business

The most downloaded report also uncovered another interesting trend, and that's just how much growth there still is in the business messaging market. Case at point: WhatsApp Business.

WhatsApp has been the most downloaded messaging app in a very long time. With a few blips along the way, but overall it's the way many communicate, especially outside of the U.S. and on Android, where iMessage doesn't exist.

That's how people communicate.

For businesses who want to have a presence in this ever-growing world, there's WhatsApp Business, a virtual storefront aimed at getting small businesses to get discovered and interact with their customers.

Since it was launched in 2018, WhatsApp Business was downloaded more than 417M times, according to our App Intelligence. That's quite a few businesses!

The trend has also been very positive from the get-go and only seems to speed up. WhatsApp Business hit a new record in August, with 22M new downloads globally, following July's 19M downloads, which was its previous record-breaking month.

It's hard to see it in the U.S., but in some countries, like Brazil, WhatsApp is the way to communicate across the board. Friends, colleagues, work, shopping, and even with some government agencies. The obvious implication is that Facebook, an unregulated for-profit company, has control of one of the largest communication channels in the world. But... they already have that with Facebook itself, so that's not new.

Looking at WhatsApp Business, it's obvious Facebook wants to have even more control over interactions, and the more they can bring themselves into shopping, the more companies like Amazon should be concerned.

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