Could Whatsapp become the West’s first superapp?
Could Whatsapp become the West’s first superapp? Its recent integration of business services suggests it wants to be, writes Paul Armstrong
Over the past month, I co-founded what’s become the fastest-growing group in the UK tech scene. Potato was spun up during London’s recent tech festivals and runs entirely on Whatsapp. Built with two sharp collaborators and now waitlisted, it’s become a daily pulse-check for operators, founders, VCs and thinkers hunting signal in the noise. Size caps are a constraint, but Meta’s latest roadmap makes one thing clear; Whatsapp is subeing weaponised to be a more powerful platform for businesses.
Whatsapp has drifted far from its origins as a privacy-first chat app. Under Meta’s stewardship, the platform has become increasingly layered with tools that go well beyond messaging. A wave of features arriving over the next 6 to twelve months suggests a broader ambition. What Meta appears to be pursuing is not just a communication tool, but a Trojan horse for something far larger: an infrastructure layer designed to centralise AI, commerce, payments and business services inside one of the most regularly used apps on the planet. The term “superapp” carries baggage, but structurally, the direction is hard to interpret as anything else.
How Whatsapp is changing
Functionality is shifting from passive messaging to proactive orchestration. New AI-powered features are designed to help users scan and interpret long threads, particularly in group environments where information density is high. Business voice calling has moved from test phase to deployment, allowing companies to run customer service functions entirely within the app. Product recommendations powered by Meta’s Llama models are also being tested inside these flows, creating a feedback loop that fuses discovery, support and transaction without exiting the chat interface. The recent Conversations summit in the United States showcased more of these features, with a clear emphasis on reducing friction for brands and increasing dependency among users.
Market penetration gives Meta room to experiment. While WhatsApp’s fastest growth remains in emerging markets, adoption in mature economies is both high and stable. Around 73 per cent of UK internet users aged 16 to 64 use Whatsapp monthly, translating to approximately 36m people. The US is estimated at 100m monthly users. India is closing in on a billion. Messaging is no longer limited to interpersonal communication. Among younger users in particular, it is replacing email, SMS and even browser-based coordination. Within this behavioural shift lies the strategic opportunity for Meta: own the interface layer where coordination, transactions and decisions increasingly occur.
Rather than replicate Wechat’s model in full, Meta appears to be abstracting the behaviours that matter most. China’s Wechat integrates messaging, payments, e-commerce, social media and even government services into a single environment. Whatsapp is not built to host that degree of functionality, nor would most Western regulatory environments allow it. Meta is instead layering in lightweight versions of those capabilities. Each integration is designed to be contextually relevant, low-friction and invisible when not needed. The result is not a Western Wechat clone, but a modular system with a similar behavioural footprint, transactional, sticky and increasingly agent-mediated.
Whatsapp, and Messenger, are emerging as the primary channels for Meta’s consumer-facing AI strategy. Distribution of is being routed through the apps, bypassing browser interfaces and app store dependencies. These agents are already being tasked with product discovery, service queries and content filtering inside conversations. Meta is building a layer where AI doesn’t feel like a separate experience but becomes embedded in the social fabric of the app. Younger demographics may find this intuitive, older ones may find it intrusive. Uptake across institutional, legal and political sectors remains decidedly sniffy. For example, US Congressional staff have formally banned Whatsapp on government devices, citing privacy and security risks. Enterprises relying on Whatsapp as a B2B channel should watch that precedent closely.
How brands are moving in on Whatsapp
Meta’s playbook is becoming clearer. The company wants Whatsapp to be the universal front door for any interaction a user might have with a brand, service or assistant, including advertising, which has historically been a big, hard no-no. Recent product tests in select markets reveal a shift. Branded messages and suggested content are being trialled, tethered to transactional or service-based interactions. Meta’s public position is that these placements will remain narrowly scoped. Commercial logic suggests that is likely the definition of ‘flexible’. As user interactions become more complex and commerce moves in-app, the pressure to monetise attention through advertising will intensify. Identity verification tools are being lobbied and promoted aggressively, which may be as much about brand safety optics as it is about fraud prevention.
The payments layer is the least mature part of the picture, for now at least. Meta regularly highlights use cases from markets where bank integrations are advanced, but user experience across borders remains fragmented. Whatsapp Pay, the peer-to-peer feature, lacks meaningful adoption in most Western markets. However, Meta has not abandoned the financial side of the superapp model. Trials involving the USDC stablecoin and wallet integrations from Circle are underway. These efforts point to an intent to power cross-border transfers and remittance use cases directly within chats. Past failures like Diem, Meta’s defunct digital currency project, suggest that the regulatory and operational hurdles remain steep. Nonetheless, signals indicate that Meta is still committed to embedding financial services inside the Whatsapp environment.
Meta also wants micropayments too when it recently announced paid channel subscriptions are rolling out globally. A possibly worrying push into Onlyfans territory, but time will tell if the community moderation the company is so fond of will work there or cause them more headaches with Europe and regulatory pals. No Meta executive was available to answer questions about this, and no examples of anyone running paid communities were provided or able to be found either. Expect this rollout to be watched closely.
Support for additional devices is expanding the platform’s potential use cases. After more than a decade, Whatsapp now runs natively on iPads. Combined with multi-device syncing, this opens up new scenarios such as personal shopping, logistics coordination, calendar integration and asynchronous service management. Each capability inches the platform closer to becoming a de facto operating layer for daily interactions. Meta’s objective appears to be full-stack consolidation. Every service, query and purchase should theoretically be addressable inside a chat thread.
Do people even want a superapp?
While the feature set grows, a critical question remains unresolved. Superapps emerged in contexts where mobile infrastructure was fragmented, platform regulation was light and users preferred one app for everything. In the West, that moment may have already passed. The next major platform shift is not toward bundling multiple services into a single app but toward agentic systems that operate across apps, devices and channels. Protocol-level AI assistants may soon perform the same functions Meta is building into Whatsapp, but without requiring user lock-in. If that future arrives first, Whatsapp’s strategy begins to look like a holdover from an earlier mobile era. Possibly why Zuck is trying to hire everyone and anyone in the AI space right now; Meta simply doesn’t have the right folks right now, and the prize is too great to lose.
Behavioural alignment is another barrier. Combining family group chats, brand interactions, payments and AI-generated recommendations inside the same app could create fatigue. Users may resist mixing personal and transactional channels, regardless of interface quality. Meta’s ability to shape behaviour is well established. However, resistance tends to cluster around trust. Whatsapp’s reputation for privacy remains compromised by its ownership. Users know Meta mines data aggressively. Continued growth despite these concerns reflects utility, not comfort.
Brand strategy has not kept pace with platform development. Most companies continue to treat Whatsapp as a customer support tool or a push notification channel, an approach that is increasingly out of step with how the platform is being rebuilt. With AI agents handling product discovery, summarising, and transactions occurring inside conversations, Whatsapp is becoming a full customer experience layer. Brands that fail to adapt may find themselves displaced from the user journey entirely. Meta’s endgame is not facilitation, it’s ownership, and they’re going to charge brands per message for the privilege.
No other Western product combines scale, user engagement and infrastructure breadth at the same level. Meta’s control over messaging, social, commerce and AI distribution gives it a structural advantage that few competitors can match. Execution is likely to be uneven, the same with adoption. Expect the obligatory regulatory blowback, and Meta will pay a fine or flex slightly. History says we’ve been here before. Nonetheless, the signal is hard to ignore. Meta is no longer trying to fix communication, instead the objective is far more ambitious: to control the interface layer of the consumer internet.
Paul Armstrong is founder of TBD Group and author of Disruptive Technologies.