Warren

Americans don't use WhatsApp because of a decision Apple made in 2013. We only know about it because the emails came out in court, and the whole thing came down to keeping your kids off Android. It started with Eddy Cue, the guy who runs Apple's services. That April he emailed the team saying Apple really needed to put iMessage on Android. Google was reportedly trying to buy WhatsApp for $1 billion at the time, and Cue's pitch was that Apple already had the best messaging app, so why not make it the one the whole world used. Craig Federighi, Apple's software chief, shut it down. He asked how Apple was supposed to get Android users to leave WhatsApp when they didn't even have iPhone friends. So back in 2013, the guy running iPhone software was basically admitting WhatsApp already owned everybody who didn't have an iPhone. Then he got to what he was actually worried about. iMessage on Android would remove "an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones." Phil Schiller, Apple's longtime marketing boss, backed him up in another email thread in 2016, writing that putting iMessage on Android would hurt Apple more than help it. None of this was public until Epic sued Apple and the emails got pulled into evidence in 2021. Now look at what that does to WhatsApp. The entire reason WhatsApp exists is that it works on any phone, so it wins wherever group chats are a mix of iPhones and Androids. Apple went the other direction on purpose. For years, every Android user in an American group chat showed up as a green bubble and their videos came through blurry, and the fix everybody landed on was buying another iPhone. Tim Cook pretty much said this out loud in 2022. A reporter at a conference told him he couldn't send videos to his mom because she had an Android, and Cook told him to buy his mom an iPhone. And it worked about as well as anything Apple has ever done. Nearly 9 in 10 American teenagers own an iPhone, and iPhones were 75% of phones sold at the big three US carriers in early 2026. If almost everyone you text has the same phone, an app whose whole selling point is working across phones has nothing to offer you. Worldwide, Apple only sells about 1 in 5 phones. Most of the world's group chats stayed mixed, so they ended up on the one app that ran on everything, and WhatsApp blew past 3 billion users. Meta says more than 100 million Americans use it now too. Apple finally added RCS texting with Android in 2024 and turned on encryption for it this May, and they still kept those messages green. Apple basically let WhatsApp have the rest of the planet so it could keep American teenagers.