How was this done? What was your pitch to the carriers? How easy-or how difficult-was this play?īrian Acton: In general, we work with wireless carriers that understand that the mobile data services they provide are the future and who want to create more data usage-and customers!-within their network. WIRED: You tackled the international market in part by inking deals with international wireless carriers, convincing them to bundle your app with phones as an alternative to classic SMS texting. Today, we support over 50 localized languages worldwide. We found that every time we added a new language-or a new phone platform for that matter-we opened the doors to more users. We felt from the very beginning that our product should be one that anyone could use no matter where they were in the world, and incorporating localized text was an obvious approach to that strategy. It included Spanish and German language translations, to name a couple. 'This is a profound thing.'īrian Acton: In early 2010, we launched our first localized version of WhatsApp for iPhone. 'It's an amazingly powerful communication tool, distributed to populations that frankly have been reamed for years by SMS charges, and it has changed all that,' David Soloff, who used WhatsApp to help bootstrap his company, Premise, told us shortly after Facebook acquisition was approved last fall. One simple messaging app could provide voice calling, video calling, instant payments, and more. And it could serve as a platform for building all sorts of other simple services in places where wireless bandwidth is limited but people are hungry for the sort of instant communication we take for granted here in the US. Facebook shelled out $19 billion because the app-a way of sending text messages over the Internet, without paying the typically high SMS fees that wireless carriers charge to send texts across their private networks-had reached a similarly enormous 450 million people across Europe and the developing world, including India and Africa.

This was because WhatsApp doesn't do much PR-and because its eponymous smartphone app was predominantly used overseas.īut, oh, how it was used overseas. The move surprised even the small coterie of journalists who so closely cover the Bay Area tech scene. When Facebook shelled out a stunning $19 billion for WhatsApp in February of last year, few here in the US had heard of the tiny Silicon Valley startup.

Whatsapp inc headquarters