Samsung was the world’s second-biggest tablet brand during Q1 2024. This is a good result, but the South Korean firm could have done better, as its sales have dropped slightly compared to the first quarter of last year. While Apple’s sales also tanked, Chinese tablet makers managed to increase their sales.
Over 6.7 million Galaxy Tabs were shipped in Q1 2024
According to the latest figures from International Data Corporation (IDC), Samsung ranked second globally in terms of tablet sales. It shipped 6.7 million tablets during Q1 2024 and captured a 21.7% share of the market. That’s 5.8% fewer shipments compared to Q1 2023. The company launched four affordable tablets—Galaxy Tab A9, Galaxy Tab A9+, Galaxy Tab S9 FE, and Galaxy Tab S9 FE+—in Q4 2023 and the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (2024) in Q1 2024. So, most of its recent launches were affordable models, and it is expected to launch the Galaxy Tab S10 early next year.
Apple ranked first with shipments of 9.9 million iPads and a market share of 32%. Compared to Q1 2023, iPad sales tanked by 8.5%. It has been nearly a year and a half since Apple launched any iPad. However, it is expected to launch two new iPad Pros with OLED screens from Samsung and M4 chips and two new iPad Airs with the M2 chip tomorrow.
Huawei improved its tablet sales by an impressive 43.6% (likely mostly in China) to reach shipment figures of 2.9 million and a market share of 9.4%. Lenovo shipped 2.1 million tablets, reaching a market share of 7%. Its year-over-year growth stood at 13.2%, which is decent. Xiaomi showed a staggering improvement of 92.6% to reach tablet shipments of 1.8 million and a market share of 5.9%.
Overall, the tablet market improved by an insignificant margin (0.5%) compared to Q1 2024. Over 30.8 million tablets were shipped globally in Q1 2024. Other brands accounted for 24% of all tablet sales during the first quarter of this year.
Faster broadband is on the way, and it won’t require network providers to overhaul their infrastructure.
nbn, the largest wholesale broadband provider in Australia, used Nokia’s Lightspan MF fiber platform, to deliver 10G, 25G, 50G and 100G broadband speeds over its existing fiber network. Nokia’s Lightspan delivers next-generation Passive Optical Network (PON) at scale.
PON is a type of fiber-optic network that combines point-to-multipoint fiber architecture with communications networking. The technology works by using a single fiber-optic connection that divides into many distinct fibers, allowing one line to serve multiple users. This is achieved through both active and passive splitters, hence the name. PON technology boosts the efficiency of a network because it reduces the number of active switching devices used. Furthermore, it requires less power and supports greater distances between users and their service providers.
(Image credit: Nokia)
A game-changer
There are a number of different types of PON technologies, including Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON), Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON), and next-generation PON like XG-PON (10 Gigabit PON) and NG-PON2 (40 Gigabit PON). Nokia’s Lightspan supports a full range of PON options.
Geert Heyninck, vice president of broadband networks at Nokia, said: “There is a huge opportunity for operators to leverage their existing fiber broadband networks to efficiently add advanced services which goes way beyond consumer services. Think enterprise, mobile backhaul, Smart City, industry 4.0. It’s important for service providers to have choices to match the right speed and cost points to meet the different use cases and market requirements they may have. As the industry’s first and only solution capable of supporting the full range of PON technologies from 10G to 25G, 50G, and even 100G, we can give operators the freedom and flexibility they need to meet their business needs while also helping to optimize network performance and reduce costs.”
The trial highlighted the ease with which operators can upgrade the 10G PON to a symmetrical 25G PON and subsequently to 50G PON or 100G, using identical passive and active fiber components. This network evolution could be game-changing in delivering an enhanced digital experience for users, but there’s currently no word on when we can expect it to become widely available.
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Human Mobile Devices (HMD) ripped up the rulebook at MWC 2024 by announcing the Barbie Flip Phone, a stripped-back (and suitably pink) device that aims to “flip the script on smartphone culture” when it launches later this year.
Now, the Nokia phone manufacturer is doubling down on its minimalist vision with the Boring Phone, an even more simplistic take on mental wellbeing tech – developed in collaboration with beer brand Heineken – whose primary function is to send and receive calls and text messages (it does have a camera, but wait until you hear the megapixel count…).
HMD says the limited-edition device is “designed to deliver the basics needed for a great night out” and “is unable to download social media or other apps,” but the phone’s voguish transparent casing and holographic stickers suggests the company still had Gen Z in mind when designing it.
You’ll get a week of standby time and up to 20 hours of talk time with the Boring Phone, and the likes of Samsung and Apple will be quaking in their boots when they learn that this device comes packing an almighty 0.3MP rear camera. We say ‘rear’ camera, but there’s only one. You do get Snake, though.
Just how boring is the Boring Phone? Check out the full specs table below:
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Boring Phone specs
Dimensions
108 x 55 x 18.9mm
Weight
123g
Displays
Internal: 2.8” QVGA | External: 1.77″ QQVGA
Camera
0.3MP + LED flash
Design
Ergonomic flip phone with DualSIM
Audio
FM radio (wired/wireless)
Connectivity
2G, 3G, 4G | Bluetooth 4.2 | 3.5mm AV jack | Micro USB
Battery
1,450mAh (removable)
Storage
Internal: 128MB | MicroSD slot up to 32GB
Charging
Micro USB
If you’re wondering what all this has to do with Heineken, the company’s head honcho, Nabil Nasser, has said the following: “At Heineken, we want to foster moments of genuine connection and help people experience the joy of true togetherness. In creating The Boring Phone we have gone back to basics, we have dialed down the tech to help people truly connect over a beer, without any distraction from the constant buzzing and dings.”
Here’s how the Boring Phone looks up close:
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Image 1 of 2
Promotional poster for the Boring Phone(Image credit: HMD)
Promotional poster for the Boring Phone(Image credit: HMD)
HMD has confirmed that the Boring Phone will debut at Milan Design Week on April 18, though we don’t yet know if (or when) the device will become available for purchase. We do know that HMD is planning to launch “an app that will turn smartphones boring” in June this year, so those who don’t manage to get their hands on the physical Boring Phone will presumably still be able enjoy/tolerate the suitably boring Boring Phone experience.
Tech company Western Digital breaks new ground as they have created the world’s first 4TB microSD card for laptops and cameras, the SanDisk Extreme PRO SDUC UHS-1 memory card. The company says the upcoming SanDisk model is set to release next year “and will be showcased at NAB 2024” in Las Vegas.
We can infer much about the upcoming card’s performance by looking at its name. UHS-1 refers to the Ultra High Speed-1 interface, which boasts a maximum data transfer rate of 104 MB/s, according to AnandTech. High transfer speeds don’t really matter to the average person, as slower cards can meet most people’s needs, but speed matters greatly to photographers.
Photographers who take a ton of pictures in rapid succession using a camera’s burst mode need SD cards that can keep up with them. Plus, the SanDisk 4TB card reportedly meets Video Speed Class V30, allowing it to support write speeds of 30MB/s. AnandTech states that level of speed is “good enough for 8K video recording.” If you’re going to shoot footage in 8K, you’ll need all the space you can get.
Speculation
Besides that, very little is known about the SanDisk 4TB card, but its name does offer more interesting tidbits. SDUC, for example, stands for Secure Digital Ultra Capacity, which is a storage standard enabling drives of up to a theoretical maximum of 128TB.
AnandTech speculates the device could “support the off-spec DDR200/DDR208 mode” to push transfer rates beyond what UHS-1 can do normally. Speeds can get as high as 170 MB/s, as seen with the SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC 1TB card. We wouldn’t be surprised if this new card has the same level of performance, if not a better. Of course, that’s assuming Western Digital decides to implement it in the first place.
For what it’s worth, the 1TB Extreme Pro card retails for $140 on Amazon at the time of this writing. The 4TB SanDisk card will likely retail for several hundred dollars more.
Be sure to check out TechRadar’s list of the best SD cards for 2024. Spoiler alert: SanDisk shows up three times.
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If you ever wished you could print on anything, Printisian could be for you. The handheld inkjet printer lets users print on various materials and surfaces, including wood, paper, metals, fabric, leather, stone and even food and skin.
Its modular design allows for easy switching between different accessories, such as an edge positioner, laser aligner, and code scanner, to meet specific printing needs.
The printer has a 5-inch touchscreen, runs on SianOS (powered by Android), has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, and a 300mAh replaceable battery.
Beware ink costs
The device can print text, pictures, date and time, and QR codes or barcodes at 35CM/s. To use it, connect it to your phone via Bluetooth, add a file, and slide the printer across the area you want to print on.
Printisian supports two sizes of ink cartridge and offers variable printing heights and a resolution of 600DPI. It can cover up to 39.3 inches per print, and you can expect “up to” 1,531 yards of print per cartridge.
As is the case with all printers, you need to factor in the cost of the ink. A small color cartridge for the device will currently set you back $59 (usual price is $79), while a large cartridge is $129 (usual price $169). The creators say you can use any compatible ink cartridge from other manufacturers – it’s designed to take standard size cartridges – although they (obviously) recommend their own cartridges as some inks may not print so well on certain surfaces.
As with any crowdsourced projects, you should be aware that backing a product doesn’t mean that it will be completed or that you will receive the item you backed. That said, at the time of writing $65,601 had been pledged, well above the $6,385 goal, so it’s looking positive.
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You can pledge for a choice of available rewards, with the basic Printisian Standard coming in at $399, for which you get the printer itself and one small black ink cartridge (0.5 Inch). The price increases significantly if you want to back a version with the various accessories included, but extras can be purchased separately.
Apple no longer sells the MagSafe Duo, its two-in-one charger for the iPhone and Apple Watch, but if you’ve found yourself with a charger-shaped hole in your life, Twelve South’s new ButterFly might patch it right up.
Similar to the MagSafe Duo, the ButterFly comes with two magnetic charging pucks in a fold-up design. It can simultaneously juice up an iPhone and an Apple Watch or your AirPods, and Twelve South claims it is “the world’s smallest 2-in-1 USB-C MagSafe charger.”
The ButterFly comes with a 20W adapter for fast charging, as well as four international plug adapters so that you can use it abroad in a variety of locations (currently the US, UK, EU and Australia). The whole thing is designed to be taken on your travels, something that’s helped by its low-profile and lightweight design.
It comes in an aluminum case to protect its components. The Apple Watch charger pops up so you can use your wearable in Nightstand Mode, and this puck can also power up an AirPods case (provided it works with wireless chargers).
All of this doesn’t come cheap, unsurprisingly. The ButterFly is priced at $129.99 from Twelve South’s store, which makes it even more expensive than the MagSafe Duo was (albeit by only 99 cents). One of the MagSafe Duo’s problems was that you could buy a rival device for a fraction of the price, and that’s a hurdle that Twelve South’s product is going to have to overcome.
The MagSafe Duo alternative
(Image credit: Twelve South)
The MagSafe Duo seemed like a clever idea for a gadget, as it let you charge two devices at once while only needing one free wall socket. As well as that, it folded up neatly and took up very little space in a bag – all features that made it ideal for travelers.
The only problem was that it used a Lightning port, and that wasn’t going to fly once the European Union (EU) and its Digital Markets Act (DMA) forced Apple to switch its devices to USB-C in order to not flout the law.
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There was some speculation that Apple would switch out the MagSafe Duo’s Lightning port for a USB-C one, but instead the company simply withdrew it from sale directly after the iPhone 15 event in September 2023.
While we wait to find out whether the MagSafe Duo makes a comeback, Twelve South’s ButterFly could be a good option if you want a high-end alternative that’s small for travel and looks great – provided you don’t mind its eye-watering price tag.
Firewalla makes configurable hardware firewalls that connect to your router, providing protection for your home or business against various network and internet threats.
The company has announced the pre-sale of Firewalla Gold Pro, the newest and most powerful addition to the “Gold” product line. Touted as the world’s most affordable 10-gigabit smart firewall, this device is designed to be compatible with the next-generation Wi-Fi 7 and high-speed 5 and 10-gigabit ISP fiber networks.
The Gold Pro features two 10-gigabit and two 2.5-gigabit Ethernet interfaces, which provide network segmentation and redundancy. The device is powered by a quad-core Intel processor and 8GB of RAM, allowing it to scale with growing networks.
Available to pre-order
The 10-gigabit ports can be used for both WAN and LAN and users can segment their network with VLANs running at 10 gigabits or connect one port to a 10-gigabit Wi-Fi 7 access point and another to a high-speed switch. The firewall supports VPNs at speeds over 2GB, ensuring a fast and secure network experience, even on the go.
“Our dedicated community is always pushing for a better network at higher speeds. The Gold Pro makes it possible to protect their homes and offices at future speeds, without monthly fees,” said Jerry Chen, founder of Firewalla. “As small businesses upgrade their infrastructure and consumers adopt faster offerings from their ISPs, the Gold Pro gives them unmatched visibility and protection for the next generation of networks.”
The Firewalla Gold Pro is currently available for pre-sale at a price of $789 with early buyers receiving an additional six months of warranty. Shipping is expected to start in early November, with a price increase likely closer to the shipping date.
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A photographic archive has been discovered in Lyon, France, that adds precious detail to what we know about the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in 1910 and its creator, Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science.
The huge collection, which comprises more than 20,000 glass photographic plates that document the laboratory’s pioneering scientific methods, crime scenes and Locard’s personal correspondence, is thrilling historians at a time when many consider that forensic science has lost its way. “There is a movement to look back to the past for guidance as to how to renew the science of policing,” says Amos Frappa, a historian affiliated with the Sociological Research Centre on Law and Criminal Institutions in Paris, who is overseeing the analysis of the images.
She was convicted of killing her four children. Could a gene mutation set her free?
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many people in Europe and beyond were thinking about how criminals might be accurately identified by using techniques such as fingerprint, blood and skeletal analysis. Locard was the first person to create the semblance of forensic science. He established the first scientific lab that came under the aegis of the police, and that was dedicated to studying ‘traces’ of criminal activity collected from crime scenes.
Garage find
The collection of photographic plates almost didn’t survive. It languished for decades in a garage belonging to the National Forensic Police Department in Ecully, a Lyon suburb. In 2005, the glass plates were rescued from the garage and stored in Lyon’s municipal archives. But at the time, the Lyon archives lacked the resources to treat the collection properly, says director Louis Faivre d’Arcier. It wasn’t until 2017 that an inspection revealed that the plates’ gelatine layer containing the image information was, in many cases, infected with mould. After a sorting and decontamination project in 2022, conservators saved around two-thirds of the plates.
Left: A tattooed woman named Marie-Clémentine in 1934; Edmond Locard’s team used tattoos as a way of identifying potential criminals. Right: Handwriting analysis as a means of identification was investigated but later spurned by Locard, who deemed it unreliable.Credit: Archives municipales de Lyon
The mammoth task of digitizing the contents of the fragile plates, which are mostly unindexed and disordered, became possible only when a local publisher and historian of funerary practices, Nicolas Delestre, offered to finance it. In collaboration with the municipal archives, his team developed a photographic protocol to capture as much information from the plates as possible. The digitization will be completed this spring, to coincide with the publication of Frappa’s French-language biography of Locard. The slow rebuilding of the indexes continues.
Locard, who worked in the early to mid-twentieth century, is famous for his maxim, which is usually formulated in English as “Every contact leaves a trace.” Trained as a forensic pathologist, he turned to the study of trace evidence after a French political scandal called the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer called Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of espionage. During the affair, Locard’s mentor Alphonse Bertillon, who had invented a method of identifying people through bodily measurements, was called on as a handwriting specialist, despite having no expertise in the field. He wrongly identified Dreyfus as the author of an incriminating note.
Forensic science: The soil sleuth
Locard, seeing other countries adopt fingerprint identification, embraced that method instead. In 1910, he set up his laboratory in the attic of Lyon’s main courthouse, and gradually expanded his scientific analyses to include traces such as blood, hair, dust and pollen.
Sherlock Holmes connection
This much was known from published sources, but the photographic archive offers details about the social and intellectual milieu that produced Locard, onthe scientific networks in which he was embedded, and on how his thinking evolved as he experimented and made errors. His exchanges with contemporaries in countries including Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the United States shaped his approach, which might be why he did not consider himself a founder of a new field. But Locard’s ideas — his scientific methods and his insistence on meticulously studying crime scenes — fell on fertile ground in Lyon’s police chiefs and judges, who, unlike their Parisian counterparts, accepted the evidence that such approaches generated. “Lyon was a receptacle,” says Frappa.
Edmond Locard using a photographic bench in the 1920s.Credit: Archives municipales de Lyon
The new collection reveals Locard’s team at work. It captures their equipment and experiments, and the forensic traces they analysed. The close-knit group socialized together, received international visitors and investigated myriad means by which people could be identified. One way was to look at people’s tattoos, and the collection contains a large set of tattoo images. Locard took inspiration from many sources, including the Lyon-based Lumière brothers, who were pioneers of cinematography, and the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he corresponded. In time, Locard discarded some techniques — notably, handwriting analysis — deeming them unreliable.
Since 2009, when a report from the US National Research Council found that many modern forensic techniques were inadequately grounded in science, the discipline has struggled to reorient itself. “By the late 20th century, it’s fair to say that forensic science had become an adjunct of law enforcement without allegiance to science,” says Simon Cole, who studies criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, and directs the US National Registry of Exonerations. Cole has written about the problems with fingerprint identification, and last year reported on the fallibility of microscopic hair comparison. These techniques are routinely used to investigate crimes in the United States and elsewhere, and the evidence they generate is admissible in court.
Modern troubles
The 2009 report suggested that improving forensic science would require larger labs in which diverse specialists were insulated from each other and from the police to prevent bias. The trouble with that view, says Olivier Ribaux, director of the School of Criminal Sciences at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is that, when considering the potentially infinite number of traces that a crime scene can generate, some subjective selection by humans is inevitable. To ensure that this selection is as informative and as unbiased as possible, the forensic scientist must understand a trace in its context — as Locard’s maxim in French originally implied. “The problem with the big labs is that they have severed the connection with the crime scene,” Ribaux says.
He favours an alternative model in which smaller labs employ generalists, who can oversee specialists in certain fields, such as ballistics and DNA, but can also offer a more holistic view of a case. These generalists would work closely with the police — a return to Locard’s approach, in other words. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive, Ribaux says. They are just snapshots of the ongoing debate about how the field should reinvent itself.
That debate will surely be fuelled by the emerging portrait of Locard, sometimes dubbed the French Sherlock Holmes, whom Frappa describes as “a man so visionary he predicted, correctly, that he would be forgotten”.
SK Hynix, Samsung‘s chief competitor and the world’s number two memory maker, has begun its audacious plan to build the largest chip production facility on the planet.
The construction at SK Hynix’s giant Yongin Semiconductor Cluster in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, will comprise four units. Work on the first unit, which is intended to be the world’s biggest three-story fabrication plant, is anticipated to commence in March 2025.
The Korea Economic Daily reports that the project is estimated to cost over 120 trillion won ($90.7 billion) and will span over two decades, with completion expected by 2046.
Government backing
The plan was first announced in 2019 but ran into delays due to Covid and licensing procedures. It received a boost in 2022 following an agreement between the government, municipalities, and companies, according to SK Hynix. The site of the first unit is now 35% prepared.
Trade Minister Ahn Deokgeun visited the site recently, promising government support for Korea’s chip industry. “All ministries will work together to ensure that Korean companies won’t lag behind global players in semiconductor manufacturing speed. We will actively support high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips to achieve more than $120 billion in semiconductor exports this year,” he said.
The Korea Economic Daily says the government will unveil strategies to accelerate artificial intelligence chip exports and bolster semiconductor equipment by the end of June.
Creating the world’s largest chip factory is just part of SK Hynix’s future plans. The manufacturing giant is also intending to invest $4 billion to build an advanced chip packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana.
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In 2014, WIRED asked me to write a few lines about my most-used app as part of an internship application. I wrote about WhatsApp because it was a no-brainer. I was an international student from India, and it was my lifeline to my family and to my girlfriend, now my wife, who lived on the other side of the world. “This cross-platform messenger gets all the credit for my long-distance relationship of two years, which is still going strong,” I wrote in my application. “Skype is great, Google+ Hangouts are the best thing to have happened since Gmail but nothing says ‘I love you’ like a WhatsApp text message.”
A few months into that internship, Facebook announced it was buying WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion. In WIRED’s newsroom, there were audible gasps at this seemingly minor player’s price tag. American journalists weren’t exactly unfamiliar with WhatsApp. But much of the country was still locked in a battle between green and blue bubbles, even as the rest of the world had switched to an app created by two former Yahoo! engineers in WIRED’s Mountain View backyard.
Text messaging was one of the few things you could do on WhatsApp in 2014. There were no emoji you could react with, no high-definition videos you could send, no GIFs or stickers, no read receipts until the end of that year and certainly no voice or video calling. And yet, more than 500 million people around the world were hooked, reveling in the freedom of using nascent cellular data to swap unlimited messages with friends and family instead of paying mobile carriers per text.
WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, launched the app in 2009 simply to display status messages next to people’s names in a phone’s contact book. But after Apple introduced push notifications on the iPhone later that year, it evolved into a full-blown messaging service. Now, 15 years later, WhatsApp has become a lot more — an integral part of the propaganda machinery of political parties in India and Brazil, a way for millions of businesses to reach customers, a way to send money to people and merchants, a distribution platform for publications, brands and influencers, a video conferencing system and a private social network for older adults. And it is still a great way for long-distance lovers to stay connected.
“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp, told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are no recommendations and no social graph.”
Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram, which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three billion users .
WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for the company.
Will Cathcart, a longtime Meta executive, who took over WhatsApp in 2019 after its original founders departed the company, credits WhatsApp’s early global growth to it being free (or nearly free — at one point, WhatsApp charged people $1 a year), running on almost any phone, including the world’s millions of low-end Android devices, reliably delivering messages even in large swathes of the planet with suboptimal network conditions and, most importantly, being dead simple, free of the bells and whistles that bloat most other messaging apps. In 2013, a year before Facebook acquired it, WhatsApp added the ability to send short audio messages.
“That was really powerful,” Cathcart told Engadget, “People who don’t have high rates of literacy or someone new to the internet could spin up WhatsApp, use it for the first time and understand it.”
In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, something Cathcart said was a huge selling point. The feature made WhatsApp a black box, hiding the contents of messages from everyone — even WhatsApp — except the sender and the receiver. The same year, WhatsApp announced that one billion people were using the service every month.
That explosive growth came with a huge flip side: As hundreds of millions of people in heavily populated regions, like Brazil and India, came online for the first time, thanks to inexpensive smartphone and data prices, WhatsApp became a conduit for hoaxes and misinformation to flow freely. In India, currently WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 700 million users, the app overflowed with propaganda and disinformation against opposition political parties, cheerleading Narendra Modi, the country’s nationalist Prime Minister accused of destroying its secular fabric.
Then people started dying. In 2017 and 2018, frenzied mobs in remote parts of the country high on baseless rumors about child abductors forwarded through WhatsApp, lynched nearly two dozen people in 13 separate incidents. In response to the crisis, WhatsApp swung into action. Among other things, it made significant product changes, such as clearly labeling forwarded messages — the primary way misformation spread across the service — as well as severely restricting the number of people and groups users could forward content to at the same time.
In Brazil, the app is widely seen as a key tool in the country’s former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 win. Bolsonaro, a far-right strongman, was accused of getting his supporters to circumvent WhatsApp’s spam controls to run elaborate misinformation campaigns, blasting thousands of WhatsApp messages attacking his opponent, Fernando Haddad.
Since these incidents, WhatsApp has established fact-checking partnerships with more than 50 fact-checking organizations globally (because WhatsApp is encrypted, fact-checkers depend on users reporting messages to their WhatsApp hotlines and respond with fact checks). It also made additional product changes, like letting users quickly Google a forwarded message to fact-check it within the app. “Over time, there might be more things we can do,” said Cathcart, including potentially using AI to help with WhatsApp’s fact-checking. “There’s a bunch of interesting things we could do there, I don’t think we’re done,” he said.
Recently, WhatsApp has rapidly added new features, such as the ability to share large files, messages that auto-destruct after they’re viewed, Instagram-like Stories (called Statuses) and larger group calls, among other things. But a brand new feature rolled out globally in fall 2023 called Channels points to WhatsApp’s ambitions to become more than a messaging app. WhatsApp described Channels, in a blog post announcing the launch, as “a one-way broadcast tool for admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls.” They’re a bit like a Twitter feed from brands, publishers and people you choose to follow. It has a dedicated tab in WhatsApp, although interaction with content is limited to responding with emoji — no replies. There are currently thousands of Channels on WhatsApp and 250-plus have more than a million followers each, WhatsApp told Engadget. They include Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (18.9 million followers), Narendra Modi (13.8 million followers), FC Barcelona (27.7 million followers) and the WWE (10.9 million followers). And even though it’s early days, Channels is fast becoming a way for publishers to distribute their content and build an audience.
“It took a year for us to grow to an audience of 35,000 on Telegram,” Rachel Banning-Lover, the head of social media and development at the Financial Times (155,000 followers) toldNieman Lab in November. “Comparatively, we [grew] a similar-sized following [on WhatsApp] in two weeks.”
WhatsApp’s success at consistently adding new functionality without succumbing to feature sprawl has allowed it to thrive, both with its core audience and also, more recently, with users in the US. According to data that analytics firm Data.ai shared with Engadget, WhatsApp had nearly 83 million users in the US in January 2024, compared to 80 million a year before. A couple of years ago, WhatsApp ran an advertising campaign in the US — its first in the country — where billboards and TV spots touted the app’s focus on privacy.
It’s a sentiment shared by Zuckerberg himself, who, in 2021, shared a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” on his Facebook page. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around,” he wrote. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”
Meta has now begun using WhatsApp’s sheer scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear so far how much money, if any, the app makes. “The business model we’re really excited about and one that we’ve been growing for a couple of years successfully is helping people talk to businesses on WhatsApp,” Cathcart said. “That’s a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. And it integrates the whole system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook that, when clicked, open directly to a WhatsApp chat with the business. These have become the fastest-growing ad format across Meta, the company told The New York Times.
A few years ago, a configuration change in Facebook’s internal network knocked multiple Facebook services, including WhatsApp, off the internet for more than six hours and ground the world to a halt.
“It’s like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. [WhatsApp] essentially functions as an unregulated utility,” journalist Aura Bogado reportedly wrote on X (then Twitter). In New Delhi and Brazil, gig workers were unable to reach customers and lost out on wages. In London, crypto trades stopped as traders were unable to communicate with clients. One firm claimed a drop of 15 percent. In Russia, oil markets were hit after traders were unable to get in touch with buyers in Europe and Asia placing orders.
Fifteen years after it was created, the messaging app now runs the world.
To celebrate Engadget’s 20th anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.