Back in January a Google exec picked on Apple for “green bubble bullying” via iMessage, and today Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a bone to pick with Apple too, and it’s also about iMessage.
In an Instagram post, Zuck says WhatsApp is “far more private and secure than iMessage”. It has end-to-end encryption that works across iPhones and Android, including for group chats, end-to-end encrypted backups, and disappearing messages. All of these are features that iMessage does not have, he points out.
The image in the post is a picture of an ad at Penn Station, which is part of a marketing campaign that started back in January and is being expanded now. The idea is to tell people in the US about the importance of end-to-end encryption, and up WhatsApp’s user numbers over there in the process. While WhatsApp is huge elsewhere, it’s always been trailing in the US. Might this campaign finally change that? We’ll have to wait and see.
We’re expanding the marketing campaign we started back in January to tell people in the U.S. about the importance of end-to-end encryption. 5.5 billion SMS messages are still sent daily in the U.S., but SMS messages aren’t secure. pic.twitter.com/c0P8FW37Rw
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) October 17, 2022
Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp at Meta, explains it all very well in a tweet thread of his own. He says WhatsApp “is growing” in the US, and undoubtedly, he’d want that to continue and pick up even more.
