Start with the numbers, not the mythology. Pew’s latest report, Americans Social Media Use 2025, puts WhatsApp at about one third of U.S. adults, up from 23 percent in 2021. That is a serious mid-tier platform in a country where everyone assumed SMS and iMessage had permanent squatter’s rights.
Drill into Pew’s earlier Americans Social Media Use 2024 cut and the segmentation is blunt. Roughly 54 percent of Hispanic adults and 51 percent of Asian adults in the U.S. say they use WhatsApp, versus 31 percent of Black adults and about 20 percent of white adults. In other words, WhatsApp is already majority behavior in the very communities brands, campaigns, and causes claim they want to engage, while their decks still talk about “texting.”
At the same time, Apple quietly locked down the high end. An eMarketer / Business Insider analysis of a March 2020 survey, summarized in Live Video Is Replacing In-Person Interactions, showed about 47.6 percent of U.S. adults using Apple’s pre-installed FaceTime app to talk with family and friends during the early pandemic, more than Skype and WhatsApp at that moment. Layer that on top of iPhone’s outsized share of the U.S. premium market and the split is obvious: FaceTime as the default for affluent, iOS-centric households; WhatsApp as the default for cross-border, Android-heavy, community-centric America.
Then there is Microsoft. Skype started as the verb for internet calling. Business press obituaries like Business Insider’s RIP Skype. Born: 2003. Died: today. trace how it peaked around 300 million monthly users and then slid into irrelevance as Microsoft pushed users toward Teams. Instead of doubling down on Skype as a consumer and small-business communication fabric, they turned it into a product line they could consolidate away. The brand survived; the behavior moved on.
Meta, for all its sins, did the opposite with WhatsApp. It kept the product simple: encrypted, phone-number based, tuned for groups, small business, and cross-border families. In July 2024, Mark Zuckerberg publicly put WhatsApp at more than 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., in his own words on the WhatsApp blog, 100 million using WhatsApp across the United States, a milestone also covered by The Verge and TechCrunch.
The honest conclusion: in the U.S., FaceTime owns mainstream personal video for the upscale iPhone crowd, while WhatsApp has become the always-on, cross-border, community layer for large and fast-growing segments. If you are still sending “strategy” decks that talk about SMS and email, with a WhatsApp bullet as an afterthought, you are not describing reality. You are describing 2012.