As Meta makes deeper inroads with businesses on WhatsApp, its biggest bet to monetize the instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, we are getting an early glimpse at how user experience might change on the free app. It’s not great.
Scores of people in India, WhatsApp’s largest market by users with over 500 million accounts, have complained about getting too many spam texts from businesses in recent months. WhatsApp, which quickly displaced the SMS app in the country by offering free texts, is increasingly looking like that SMS app, users say.
Thousands of brands in India have signed up for WhatsApp, consistently succeeding in reaching eyeballs of more than 80% users, a person familiar with the matter said, a figure miles ahead of campaigns run on emails and traditional texts. What’s more annoying is that even after users have blocked some businesses, many return to the inbox from different phone numbers, according to author’s account.
WhatsApp for business is fast becoming WhatsApp for spam.
Blocking a couple of accounts every day, these days. PR agencies are also now spamming on WhatsApp. pic.twitter.com/dvgbqx7cz8
— Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin) September 15, 2022
In many ways, the issue doesn’t come as a surprise.
Google offered businesses in India the ability to use RCS to supercharge their communication with customers in the country, the company’s biggest market by users. Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption.
The company had to halt the service in the country after some businesses started to abuse the company’s anti-spam policies to send promotional messages to users in India.
Read more about WhatsApp’s rampant spam issue on Rest of the World.
In India, businesses are increasingly spamming users on WhatsApp by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch
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