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........

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