Social Media & Online Communities · Recorded milestone
Phone messaging apps
Recorded year2009
WhatsApp, and WeChat from 2011, replace paid texts with free internet messages and group chats for billions.
Explore this milestone on the interactive mapBuilt on
- SmartphoneRecorded · 1994enables
- Instant messagingRecorded · 1996enables
- App storesRecorded · 2008enables
Led to
Sources & evidence
Dataset updated 2026-10-18. This individual record has not been separately re-reviewed.