This could be a significant advance in Meta’s push to make WhatsApp an essential utility in India. Today, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has announced that Indian citizens will now be able to access various official documents via WhatsApp.
Political Collab
Integrating with its Digilocker digital documentation initiative, the program will make WhatsApp a more important connector in more ways, which could help further reinforce the app’s value for Indian users. WhatsApp is currently the most popular messaging platform in India with over 487 million users. As India’s digital transformation continuously takes shape, more and more people are becoming increasingly reliant on WhatsApp to stay connected, with Meta also looking to build more options for bill payment, money exchange, shopping, and more.
In a lot of ways, Meta’s looking to replicate the way messaging apps are used in China, where WeChat has become an essential tool for many mundane daily activities. True enough, amid the pandemic, the significance of WeChat was further emphasized, with Chinese citizens required to show their health status via barcodes on either WeChat or Alipay to ride public transport or travel to certain areas.
Chinese users regularly use their digital identity via messaging apps to virtually conduct all of their daily transactions, including transport, shopping, banking, utilities payment, and more. According to The South China Morning Post:
“Many people outside China either still haven’t heard of WeChat or they think it’s the country’s equivalent of popular messaging service WhatsApp or social media giant Facebook. For many people in China, WeChat is much more – it is not an overstatement to say it’s an indispensable part of their everyday lives.”
Meta has tried numerous times and on various stages to replicate WeChat’s utility with Western users, starting with its push to integrate Messenger bots in 2016, to the addition of games to expand usage and make Facebook Pay roll out to various markets. While these efforts seem to have very little effect in the West, in India, social media adoption is still evolving, it sees significant opportunity for the nation’s 1.4 billion citizens.
The Wrap
You can see then why Meta is so keen to build on WhatsApp’s presence in India – while Meta’s also rolling out new business tools like ‘Recurring Notifications’ and WhatsApp Cloud Hosting. Currently, these are available for free, so make the most of them and check ‘em out before they eventually turn into paid tools.
Til now, Meta hasn’t been able to effectively monetize WhatsApp, despite paying $19 billion for it back in 2014. Currently, this seems to be its strongest pathway to building it into a necessary layer for business interactions, helping Meta dominate yet another market.
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Sources