The New Yorker:

The platform has become a core technology around the world, relied on by governments and extended families alike. What are we all doing there?

By Sam Knight

The first WhatsApps weren’t WhatsApps. In the spring of 2009, Jan Koum, a thirty-three-year-old computer programmer, was trying to get people interested in a product he had developed for Apple’s App Store, which had opened the previous summer. Koum tweaked his app’s name every few days—from Status App to Smartphone Status to iPhone Status—so that it would appear among the newest releases. The idea was that the app would show people what their contacts were doing before they called or messaged them. Maybe they were available, or at the gym, or sleeping. Between five and ten thousand people downloaded Koum’s app, but hardly anyone used it. They just called whomever they were going to call. Koum has a dry, somewhat brooding sensibility. “The app had no usability or functionality that was useful,” he said. He wondered what he was doing with his life.

That June, Apple enabled push notifications on iPhones. Now, when one of Koum’s users updated his status, it was broadcast to all of his contacts who were also on the app. People began to share real-time information: they were going to a bar, or to a movie. During the summer, Koum worked with Igor Solomennikov, a coder based in Moscow, to add a messaging function. They used open-source software and enlisted some friends to test the system.

Koum was in his office, on the second floor of his house, in Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley, when he saw that it was working. “It registered itself, connected, and messages started flowing between two people,” he recalled. “I was, like, Holy shit, I just built a messenger for iPhone.” WhatsApp became WhatsApp. “Almost everybody went from, like, Oh, this is useless to Oh, this is very useful,” Koum said. The network came alive.

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