Building WhatsApp for 3 Billion Users with Alice Newton-Rex
Fresh out of the studio, Alice Newton-Rex, Vice President and Head of Product at WhatsApp, joins us to explore how the messaging platform balances innovation with privacy for over 3 billion users worldwide. In the conversation, Alice explained WhatsApp's three guiding principles: simple, reliable, and private. She emphasized that the features they say "no" to are often more important than those they approve, highlighting how WhatsApp has evolved beyond personal messaging to include business services that serve over 200 million businesses globally and balancing innovation with trust on how Meta AI is integrated into the platform. Last but not least, Alice describes what great would look like for WhatsApp continuing to be the most private way for people to communicate while maintaining simplicity and reliability at global scale.
"Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to message the people in their life, and they should be able to carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in doing so. But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close friends and family. It's why we're doing things like business messaging. It's why we built new features like channels and status and updates tab separate from your personal chats. We think that if we carry on getting the core of private messaging right, it also gives us the opportunity to build more of these features that users want." - Alice Newton-Rex
Profile: Alice Newton-Rex, Vice President & Head of Product, WhatsApp (LinkedIn)
Here is the edited transcript of our conversation:
Bernard Leong: Welcome to Analyse Asia, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business, technology and media in Asia. I'm Bernard Leong, and I often say that in a world where privacy is increasingly scrutinized, the true differentiator for platforms is how they balance innovation with trust. How do we continue to evolve messaging in a way that is both intelligent and private? With me today is Alice Newton-Rex, Vice President and Head of Product for WhatsApp to dive into this very question. We explore how WhatsApp, being used by probably 2 billion people globally [which has been updated to 3 billion by TechCrunch on 1 May 2025 and you will hear 2 billion here given the recording was done weeks before the announcement], is shaping the future of private messaging, leveraging Meta AI and empowering business across emerging markets. Alice, welcome to the show.
Alice Newton-Rex: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on.
Bernard Leong: It's early morning in Singapore. In preparing for this interview, I found out that we are both alumni from Cambridge University in the UK, not the other one in Boston. So to start with the origin story, how did you begin your journey?
Alice Newton-Rex: When I was at Cambridge, I studied classics, Latin and ancient Greek as well as the culture of those two civilizations. Learning the ancient languages was a really good background for the rigours of learning coding languages, and learning about how people lived in societies very different from my own was an important grounding in the empathy needed to build products that will serve people in different countries around the world. I think lots of people underestimate the benefits of an education in the humanities, even if you're planning to have a technical career. After my undergraduate degree, I did a year-long fellowship at Harvard where I learned to code among other things and worked with a group at MIT developing a mobile health app for use in low-income settings.
Then I came back to the UK and started my career at the UK's then-new government digital service where we set out to build public services online that were as well designed and easy to use as the best private sector digital services. After that, I joined a Series A startup called WorldRemit, an app for international money transfer, mostly for migrants sending money from the US and Europe back to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Over the next five years, I led the product and design teams as we grew the service to more than 150 countries around the world and the business to be worth billions of dollars. Then I joined WhatsApp initially to lead their product team in the UK. WhatsApp has two engineering sites in California and London.
Bernard Leong: So that was how you ended up at WhatsApp and subsequently from there, you are now leading product. Given that you've gone through the government side and doing a lot of work related to messaging in the emerging markets, can you share any lessons about your career journey so far?
Alice Newton-Rex: I think a lot of people see their career as a series of stepping stones that they have to make it across to get to some career goal. I think this is a mistake. In my experience, people accelerate faster when they work on problems they really care about rather than choosing roles for some perceived future value to their career. Even if that doesn't work out, at least you've always been working on problems you care about. I didn't think for a moment when I joined WhatsApp that within three years I would be the head of product, and I definitely wasn't planning for that. But I loved my job, that showed, and I think it contributed to me getting this role.
Bernard Leong: I think that's a point - usually it's the journey rather than the destination itself. I probably should get to the main subject of the day. I want to talk about WhatsApp, a little bit about business, Meta AI and privacy. WhatsApp is now more than a chat app; it's probably essential infrastructure in many parts of the world. So for a start, how do you think about prioritizing product innovation for such a vast global and culturally diverse user base? I'm sure in your journey, a user of WhatsApp in Singapore is probably very different from a user in India or maybe in Australia.
Alice Newton-Rex: Absolutely, over 2 billion people in more than 180 countries rely on WhatsApp every day, and we take that responsibility really seriously. We always try to stay true to three core principles as we design the app: simple, reliable, and private. You'll probably hear me say those three words a lot today, so you'll be able to empathize with my team, who also hear them a lot. In fact, "simple, reliable, private" is the name of my conference room in the office.
I think you can't say something enough. Let me say a bit more about what it means. We think the app should be so simple that anyone anywhere could use it. People often tell me, "even my grandparents find it easy to use WhatsApp," which I love. It needs to be so reliable that it will work even if you're on a basic smartphone in rural India with a poor data connection.
We've learned that if we make it work even in the toughest circumstances, then it actually works better for everyone, even if you are a tech worker with the latest phone and super high-speed wifi in Singapore. And it needs to be private because without privacy in your communication, you aren't free to be yourself, not to mention that you're vulnerable to hackers or criminals or anyone who wants to steal your information.
So anything we build has to be designed with these three principles in mind. In terms of picking what to build, a huge part of our process is listening to our users and understanding what things they want to do with the product or what they are already trying to use it for but getting stuck.
Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to message the people in their life, and they should be able to carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in doing so.
But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close friends and family. It's why we're doing things like business messaging. It's why we built new features like channels and status and updates tab separate from your personal chats. We think that if we carry on getting the core of private messaging right, it also gives us the opportunity to build more of these features that users want.
Bernard Leong: One interesting question because I also like product as well. When you first stepped into being the VP of product role, what was the steepest learning curve in leading such a high-impact platform? I'm pretty sure that as you said, the three core principles need to be right because you're designing for so many users in the world.
Alice Newton-Rex: The steepest learning curve was probably learning that the features you say no to are more important than the features you say yes to. With such a massive and diverse user base, it's easy to come up with 50 ideas before breakfast - cool blue sky things that tens of millions of people might want to use, but that leaves a few billion people who don't want them.
Not only does that clutter up the app, but it also distracts you from working on the core things that people really care about - things that sometimes sound less exciting, like driving up core reliability or making small improvements for the user journeys that collectively people are using billions of times a day.
Like, recently we just made it a little bit easier to send a reaction, and it's had a major impact on how people use the app - many more reactions are being sent. So I have to say no to a lot of ideas and keep my team laser-focused on the things that most people really want, irrespective of whether they're super noticeable, like introducing channels or AI, or very subtle, like improving the results when you search for your contacts.
Bernard Leong: I find the channels part interesting because I can actually get information, specifically when I teach in the university and need to disseminate information to the students on my side of the world. For context, can you give my audience a snapshot of WhatsApp's current product footprint? I probably started right at the beginning when I first used WhatsApp - it was basically sending private messages, images and videos. Today there are a lot of business services as well.
Alice Newton-Rex: At its core, WhatsApp is a private messaging app for conversations between friends and family, and I think that's the main WhatsApp we're all familiar with. Outside of the calls and chats tab, the other most important tab is the updates tab, which is where you'll find status - that's WhatsApp's stories product for sharing updates from your daily life with contacts - and channels, which were introduced in 2023 as a way to keep up to date with things that you're interested in.
Then we have the WhatsApp business app, which is a free app with more than 200 million users made for small and medium businesses that allows them to connect with their customers. Lastly, we have the WhatsApp business platform - that's our product for larger businesses that need a more scalable solution to connect with their customers.
These are businesses like an airline sending boarding passes to their users, or an e-commerce company, or a bank. People can either reach out to receive support from a business like this or they opt in to receive useful information in return. We charge businesses to send these types of messages.
Bernard Leong: In many countries, mobile is probably the primary gateway to the internet. How do those usage patterns actually influence how you think about the product? Because the entry point is different.
Alice Newton-Rex: You're absolutely right about mobile. Indeed for many people around the world, I think WhatsApp is really their experience of the internet. That's definitely shaped our business products. For example, one of our two major revenue lines is click-to-WhatsApp ads. These are ads that run on Facebook and Instagram.
When you click on them, instead of taking you to a business's website, they take you directly into a WhatsApp chat with the business. A lot of the businesses we serve don't even have a website - they just run their whole operation on WhatsApp. So it's great for them to be able to advertise in a way that suits their business.
On the consumer side, we design features with an awareness of people's mobile behavior. In a lot of countries around the world, including many in Asia, we know that users often have more than one SIM and therefore more than one number on their phone. So we give them the ability to have two numbers on WhatsApp that they can toggle between.
As well as people having two numbers on one phone in lower-income settings, lots of people share phones within a household. That makes some of our privacy features so important, like Chat Lock, which allows you to hide particularly personal chats so they don't appear in your inbox and you enter a special pin to access them.
Bernard Leong: That is interesting because I actually didn't think about use cases like one house sharing one phone but with multiple users. Have any market-specific behaviours or trends surprised you from a product leadership standpoint, specifically in emerging economies?
Alice Newton-Rex: I spend most of my life in the UK where WhatsApp is ubiquitous for speaking to friends and family. But when I travel to other countries, especially emerging economies, I am often amazed at how much people use WhatsApp for interacting with businesses. This is true also in Southeast Asia, especially countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore where a lot of small businesses are already using WhatsApp to connect with their customers, whether that's a local grocer, pet shop owner, or fashion outlet.
This behavior happened long before we ever had specific business products, but it's what inspired us to launch the WhatsApp business app in 2018 and make it easier for businesses to do the things they were already trying to do. This version of WhatsApp has features like away messages because you can't always be on as a business owner, or catalogs, which lets them share their products easily.
Another consumer trend we've seen, particularly in some emerging markets, is users prefer to send voice messages over typing because they're fast and easy and let you have a more expressive conversation. But the problem with voice messages is the receivers don't always like listening to them, perhaps if you're on the move or in a loud place or you just get a long voice message and don't have time to listen to it.
For some of those moments, we introduced voice message transcriptions last year which turn the voice message into text so you can keep up with it however you want.
Bernard Leong: I have not encountered that, but I do know that in China, most people would do voice messaging much more often compared to other parts of the world. When I see Chinese users using WhatsApp to communicate with me, they end up doing the same behavior. But the transcription feature - I should try to figure out how to use that because I would prefer just seeing the message rather than listening to it.
One more curious point. In my previous role as a CIO, we were looking at WhatsApp for Business to have one of the subsidiaries use it as a customer relationship management tool to engage for purchase of new properties. WhatsApp for Business supports everything from very small merchants to global enterprises like Singapore Airlines - I now receive my notifications through them via WhatsApp. How has this ecosystem evolved and what does the current scale look like today?
Alice Newton-Rex: I think you're right to call out the very different kinds of businesses using WhatsApp for Business. As I said, it all kicked off in 2018 when we started really supporting businesses, although in fact they had been widespread on the platform for a long time before that.
Maybe a good way to understand the scale is to look at some of the kinds of businesses. There's a small family business called Ruly Silver that makes customized jewelry specializing in wedding bands. They're based in Jakarta, Indonesia. They've got just one small physical store, but using the WhatsApp business app and its various tools, they've been able to export their jewelry all the way to places like Paris.
It's not an isolated example. Today there are more than 200 million users of the WhatsApp business app. Staying with Indonesia examples, a large established organization like Bank Mandiri uses WhatsApp Business Platform to manage close to 10,000 interactions daily. When I was in India recently, I bought a ticket for the Delhi metro directly within a WhatsApp thread like tens of thousands of other people do all the time. And this is happening at scale - at WhatsApp scale - all around the world.
Bernard Leong: I forgot to mention, for me, Saturday is when I go to send all my kids via Grab driver across all the different tuition centers. Most of the tuition centers use WhatsApp for all communications that are disseminated to us, even down to dealing with payments. So it's pretty ubiquitous in terms of how users are engaging businesses in this part of the world.
I'm quite curious - WhatsApp is renowned for its commitment to privacy. This was true from the beginning, even before it was acquired by Meta. How do you ensure these new features, including AI, still align with the foundational promise of privacy? I think this is an area you are probably most qualified to talk about.
Alice Newton-Rex: I'm really pleased you asked about that because privacy is at the heart of everything we do. I mentioned it's in our core three design principles. We use end-to-end encryption by default to protect all your chats with friends, family, colleagues, so that no one else, not even WhatsApp can see them. That's the very baseline of our privacy promise.
But we also look for ways to make WhatsApp even more private on top of that. We think of these as adding additional layers of protection. In recent years, I'm thinking of features like disappearing messages and view-once messages, so that conversations disappear on a timer.
We've added a bunch of group controls, like the ability to leave a group silently - that was a hotly demanded one - and also control who can add you to a group. We've given users more power to decide who sees when you're online and silence unknown callers. Right now we're testing advanced chat privacy, which will give users even more control over who can export your chats or save media that you share with them in one-to-ones and groups.
As for AI, Meta AI only reads what you share with it, but your personal messages remain end-to-end encrypted. Chats with AI are visually indicated so it's very clear that they're different from your personal messages and conversations.
Because we've had such great feedback on AI and WhatsApp so far, we are continuing to explore ways to make it more useful, maybe to give you help in writing your messages or reading your noisy group chats. There are, of course, major technical challenges about how we can do this in a private way, so we won't be releasing any features until we've innovated enough behind the scenes to ensure that this can be done while preserving the privacy of everyone's personal messages.
Bernard Leong: AI is a little bit more tricky because you have the foundation models which are pretty large and require quite a lot of server-side computing. There are also what we call small language models. Perhaps from there, until the best model comes along, maybe that would be more useful when it goes into phones themselves.
You already talked about your three key principles. Let's say you want to decide whether a new feature, specifically anything around privacy or AI, should be added. How do the principles guide your team in thinking about it, so that it actually adds value rather than introducing complexity for the product?
Alice Newton-Rex: I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think it is the central trade-off decision that we're always trying to make. The principle is: if you just want to use WhatsApp to message the people in your life, then you should be able to do that and have a great experience. It's so important that we protect that core experience.
But because we are always listening to our users, we know that there are a lot of other people who are eager to do more with WhatsApp. We want to be able to meet the most important of those needs with other optional experiences. Channels, which is one of the biggest product changes I've led in this role, is a good example of how we approach this.
We'd heard from a lot of people that they wanted to be able to keep up with the topics and organizations they're interested in alongside their private messages. So we built channels as a one-way broadcast tool and we decided to put it in the updates tab, so it'd be separate from your private messages.
We also wanted to build the most private version of this feature. For example, no one else can see which channels you are following. So even though it was introducing a broadcast feature, we wanted to adhere to our principles around privacy. So far it's proved quite popular.
Some big use cases are sports teams giving real-time updates on matches, entertainment like Indonesian Idol or Netflix, governments like the Singapore government, which has a big channel with over a hundred thousand followers, and some celebrities. I loved your university example as well. But it's not for everyone, and that's fine. If you don't want to follow a single channel, you don't have to, and you're not going to see any channel updates. With WhatsApp, we want you to always feel in control.
Bernard Leong: One of the best use cases I have for my students is because I teach AI in universities, both technical and for business executives, and the field is changing so much - practically every week. It almost becomes like my weekly channel to send updated information to them. I always tell them, whatever I teach you, in three months something has changed. So I made a commitment that we will update any materials that have changed and send it to them across WhatsApp.
When I watch WhatsApp, the iteration doesn't tend to be so fast. What is the balance between iterating on the product quickly versus maintaining user trust? Especially working at your scale, because one feature change can affect so many people, and different cultures may have different nuances in how they use WhatsApp.
Alice Newton-Rex: That's a great question. The real answer is if we ever encounter a conflict between iterating, especially trying to iterate fast, and user trust, then we would pick user trust every time. That's quite rare in technology companies. We would rather move more slowly if a feature needs more time to hit our quality bar or be as simple, reliable, and private as what users expect and deserve from WhatsApp.
Having said that, getting improvements into the hands of our users faster has been a big focus for me and the WhatsApp leadership team since I took on this role. We've evolved the organization to make that possible. I think it's been working. We are shipping improvements faster than ever before, and we've had some recognition for this.
For example, last year we were one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of the Year, which would've been inconceivable for WhatsApp only a few years ago. But more important than industry awards, we've heard a huge amount of love from our users for all of the new features we've brought them lately, some of which they've been hoping for a long time.
Whether it's core messaging features like editing messages or the unread filter, or features and updates like channels. A great one we launched pretty recently this year is the ability to add music to your status, and that's delighted a lot of people.
Bernard Leong: I saw that one. When I look at every product, I always try to work out exactly what kind of users they are intended for. What is one thing that you know about privacy and WhatsApp that very few do?
Alice Newton-Rex: I think very few people know how much work goes into building WhatsApp's high levels of privacy, especially at our scale. Encryption introduces big technical challenges into features that otherwise seem simple. For example, adding polls, which is one of those features people have been asking for ages, and we did not too long ago.
Because with encryption, so much happens on the client side versus on the server. Another example was adding end-to-end encrypted backups, which was a big technical challenge if you consider that over a hundred billion messages are sent every day.
We were the first product at scale to introduce this, and then Apple followed, which we thought was great. But it required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage. We were happy to invest in that work so that we could give people more privacy.
Bernard Leong: A lot of the innovations at this kind of scale are very subtle and not many people realize it. I think Facebook has actually innovated not just in that, but even in databases and open computing as well. And now with Meta AI integrated into WhatsApp, what is the mental model that's going to be guiding AI within that?
What are the most interesting use cases that will be exciting from your vantage point when integrating AI into messaging? You alluded to the fact that people were thinking about asking the AI to frame messages.
Alice Newton-Rex: In many countries, as you say, you can now chat with the Meta AI assistant directly in WhatsApp. My personal belief is that messaging will be the main way that people interact with AI in the future. The promise of LLMs is you can find out anything or eventually do anything just by having a chat with an intelligent agent.
We've designed WhatsApp for chatting. I also think WhatsApp can democratize AI by making it available to a global audience, not just the usual tech elites and early adopters. We're already seeing the signs of this. Meta AI within WhatsApp is popular in the US but it's also been really popular in countries like India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Colombia.
I'm excited about how useful it is and how it can help people get things done in their daily lives. Some of the popular use cases for Meta AI on WhatsApp are for homework help, whether for yourself or your children.
Or for recipe ideas and other information seeking. Sometimes people tell me they're using things like, "somebody sent me a message about this thing - help me understand what that thing is." People are also using it to be creative. That's another really interesting avenue. You can generate stickers or images of anything you like. You can even generate images of yourself, which is pretty fun, like "imagine me climbing Mount Everest."
Lastly, there are big opportunities that AI is creating for business messaging. We see an opportunity for AI assistants to help businesses of any size benefit from being able to have closer, more engaging interactions with their customers. We're testing agents right now with a small number of businesses in a few markets to start, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and we expect to scale more soon. I'm just excited to see where we can take it.
Bernard Leong: I have two questions for that, but I'll go with a more interesting one first. For the upcoming features, you're testing things like AI agents for businesses. How do you specifically design it to enhance user control or safety within WhatsApp itself?
Alice Newton-Rex: User control and safety is paramount when we're designing anything. Specifically in the case of the AI that businesses are using, a huge part of it is making sure everybody understands the nature of the conversation. The user has to get information and choose to continue to know that they're having a conversation with an AI business.
The business is also doing the same - knows that the AI can be responding on their behalf to their customers. But zooming out from the AI agents specifically, a lot of our safety work is done in the backend, such as using machine learning to identify spams and scammers based on things like how many messages are they sending per second, and then we can remove those bad accounts.
Some of it's more visible stuff. WhatsApp is fundamentally architected to protect people from unwanted contacts. You can't search for people or message them unless you have their phone number. Whenever you get a message from someone who isn't in your contacts, we've always asked you right away if you want to block or report them.
We've tried to enhance some of these safety features and controls more recently. Maybe AI will help people impersonate other people, but when somebody starts a conversation with you, now we show a context card when you get a message from someone you don't know. That will give you information like: is the phone number saved in your phone book? What country is the number from? Do you have any groups in common? These kinds of things help people decide whether they want to continue the conversation or block the number.
Similarly, now we're giving people the option to silence all unknown callers since we know a lot of scams take place via calls.
Bernard Leong: I totally like your block feature. When I get an unknown number, typically even if it sounds relatively legitimate, sometimes it's actually a scamming message, so I just press the block button and get rid of it. If it's actually surprisingly a business account, I like the way you designed it so when I press that button, it automatically gets everything done, and you even give me the option to delete the conversation as well.
How do you ensure safe AI features, which may require context of your information, remain non-intrusive and preserve the kind of simplicity that WhatsApp has? I'm not even talking about adding things like hallucination, because AI also has the propensity of making errors.
Alice Newton-Rex: First and most importantly, all of our AI features are optional. If you don't want to use them and you just want to keep messaging the way you are today, you can totally do that. I mentioned earlier that we try and make the chats with AI really visually distinct so it's clear to people that these are different than their personal messages and conversations.
But in general, I actually think one of the interesting things is that people like interacting with AI within WhatsApp because they find it simple. They don't have to download and learn some new app. They can just interact by chatting in the thread the way they normally do.
Bernard Leong: They actually sometimes just use the AI casually to generate an image or an emoji. Given that while a lot of people talk about this year as the year for AI agents, and now WhatsApp is becoming increasingly important for business and transactions, what are some of the key safety challenges that the product will be addressing from your point of view?
Alice Newton-Rex: One big upcoming feature that's going to be really impactful is usernames, which are going to add an extra degree of privacy so that you don't need to share your phone number when you're messaging someone, including when you're messaging a business.
We always make it clear to people when they are chatting with a business, and we let you block and report them and share the reasons that you're doing that. We've got policies in place that businesses have to follow about what they can or cannot sell or promote on WhatsApp.
Recently we also launched Meta Verified, which is where we verify that someone is the real business they say they are. In return, we make it easier for businesses to build credibility with their customers by getting a blue verified badge and impersonation protection among some other things.
Bernard Leong: For Meta Verified, how does the business user actually get access to it? Is it just registering through your platform and making sure that they upload the relevant documents to verify who they are, or some form of business know-your-customer?
Alice Newton-Rex: It's exactly that. If you're a user of the WhatsApp business app, you can go through our verification flow where you need to provide some information about yourself, and then if we can verify you, we'll award you that verified blue badge. It comes with a bunch of additional useful features for businesses as well.
Bernard Leong: How would you assess user trust, qualitatively or quantitatively, within WhatsApp?
Alice Newton-Rex: We hear from our users in various ways. We get a ton of feedback and feature requests and people telling us what they like or what they don't like within the app itself, using the feedback option. That's how we originally heard a lot about people wanting reactions before we'd introduced that, for example.
In fact, we had a massive spike in feedback after we started a gradual rollout of Meta AI in Indonesia, where vast numbers of people who didn't have access yet got in touch to say they wanted us to make it available to them immediately, which was encouraging.
We also hear feedback on social and we listen to those channels carefully. And we travel to countries where WhatsApp is used a lot to hear from users on the ground. We think it's important for everyone who's building WhatsApp to use the app so they can learn from our users directly.
Even the leadership team - I've personally made recent trips to India, Mexico, Brazil, to do user research about the app and on new features. Nothing really compares to getting to talk to people in person, see their context, and just learn more about their lives.
Bernard Leong: In every trip you go, whether it's Mexico or India, you come back with this whole list of features that you and your team think about where to prioritize?
Alice Newton-Rex: Yes, it's always a challenge for the team.
Bernard Leong: What is the one question you wish more people would ask you about WhatsApp?
Alice Newton-Rex: I think I wish more people would ask me, why is privacy so important in communication?
Bernard Leong: Why is privacy so important then?
Alice Newton-Rex: Thank you. Privacy protects everyone, whether it's journalists talking to their sources, or conversations between doctors and patients, or when you need to share your credit card number with your child. The reality is all of our personal exchanges are at risk from increasing threats posed by hackers, malware companies, and more.
But it goes beyond that. We believe in everyday privacy, not just privacy for the hypersensitive conversations, because everyday privacy makes you feel free to be yourself. You wouldn't feel comfortable being yourself if there was a camera in your living room recording everything you did and said. You wouldn't accept it in your physical life and you shouldn't accept it in your digital life either.
Of course end-to-end encryption is the gold standard here. But another nice example of everyday privacy on WhatsApp is disappearing messages. It's a relief to know you can say what you want now and not have it hanging around forever and ever into the future. As we launched that, it's growing hugely. Now lots of people have it turned on by default for all of their conversations.
Bernard Leong: I do know that specifically for younger kids and teenagers, they like to do that. So my traditional closing question: What does great look like for WhatsApp in the next few years on the product and privacy?
Alice Newton-Rex: I think it looks like continuing to be the best, most private way that people can communicate and continuing to keep the app simple, reliable, and private for more than 2 billion people.
Bernard Leong: Alice, many thanks for coming on the show and educating me on the evolution of WhatsApp. I'm talking about an app that I probably use at least 10% of the time on my mobile phone. In closing, any recommendations which have inspired you recently?
Alice Newton-Rex: I was trying to think if I could give pithy answers like business books or something, but honestly, I'm the mother to a two and 4-year-old, so I read a lot of children's books. And I think the older ones are all of the best ones, like Dr. Seuss. There are some great life lessons in there. I don't know if you know "Oh, the Places You'll Go!", but the way it talks about handling adversity in life, I think that's brilliant.
Bernard Leong: Believe it or not, I think children's books from the UK are actually better than most parts of the world. Like Oliver Jeffers [author of Lost & Found] and the other lady [Julia Donaldson] who writes very good books on that. So how can my audience find you?
Alice Newton-Rex: I'm on LinkedIn as Alice Newton-Rex, or if you're interested in getting more news about everything exciting that's coming up on WhatsApp and all of the features my team and I are working on, you can follow the official WhatsApp channel, as well as the @WhatsApp handle and @WhatsAppBusiness handles on Instagram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Bernard Leong: You can definitely find our podcast anywhere, from YouTube to Spotify. And of course, drop us feedback on any channel that you want to. Alice, many thanks for coming on the show, and thank you for sharing a lot of what you are building today with us.
Alice Newton-Rex: Thank you too.
Podcast Information: Bernard Leong (@bernardleong, Linkedin) hosts and produces the show. Proper credits for the intro and end music: "Energetic Sports Drive" and the episode is mixed & edited in both video and audio format by G. Thomas Craig (@gthomascraig, LinkedIn). Here are the links to watch or listen to our podcast.
