With WhatsApp for Business it appears that one of the sticking points has been time - from setting up WhatsApp for Business in the first place to responding to different kinds of messages. This year’s installment is a significantly more toned down affair than in recent years - no big crowds (it’s all virtual), no big product and hardware announcements (it doesn’t appear that there are any… so far), and it feels more like a Zoom conference - and today’s news about business-oriented developer tools not only resets the event back around its original developer focus, but it also bolsters that commercial strategy.

The F8 conference, hatched originally as a hackathon, had grown into a very big event. More generally, Facebook and its many apps are at their heart very consumer services - they are used by billions of people to keep in touch with each other, for diversion, and to stay informed about whatever matters to them.īut Facebook the business has been gradually building out a very extensive and lucrative commercial infrastructure around that engaged audience, one that started with advertising but has extended deeper into marketing, customer service, workplace productivity, and shopping. The news comes on the heels of Facebook unveiling the general availability of Messenger API for Instagram earlier today, and forms part of a bigger series of announcements aimed at doing business more easily on the platform. Today, as part of its F8 event, Facebook is unveiling some updates to the WhatsApp API to expand that experience. WhatsApp now has more than 2 billion users globally, and by comparison its efforts to cultivate more business usage have been quite modest: just over 175 million people message with WhatsApp Business accounts daily for things like customer support or to discuss products.

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