Meta has never been especially sentimental about originality. Why endure the expense of inventing the future when someone else has already demonstrated that it works?
Snapchat produced Stories. Instagram acquired Stories almost by osmosis. TikTok turned short-form videos into the internet’s favourite pastime. Meta responded with Reels—and, thanks to TikTok’s ban in India, scarcely had to persuade anyone to make the switch. Silicon Valley likes to celebrate innovation. Meta has always preferred adaptation.
Its latest muse appears to be Telegram.
WhatsApp’s proposed username feature, allowing people to chat without revealing their phone numbers, has barely emerged from the laboratory before attracting the Government’s attention. Officials fear it could make phishing, impersonation and the increasingly fashionable “digital arrest” scams even easier. Meta insists everyone should relax. Usernames will be optional. Public figures will be protected. Suspicious accounts will face restrictions. There will, naturally, be safeguards.
There are always safeguards.
The more interesting question is not whether Meta can build usernames. Of course it can. The more interesting question is why WhatsApp suddenly wants them at all.
For years, WhatsApp possessed a rare corporate virtue: contentment. It knew precisely what it was and, more importantly, what it was not. It was a messaging app attached to a phone number. Hardly glamorous, admittedly, but neither is a front-door lock. Its value lay precisely in the fact that it was reassuringly ordinary.
A phone number never eliminated fraud. Scammers have managed that obstacle for years. But it did provide a modest layer of accountability. Most conversations began with a reasonable assumption that the person on the other end was who they claimed to be.
Telegram took a different view. Usernames became part of its identity. They offered convenience and privacy, but also anonymity. That combination proved wonderfully attractive to perfectly ordinary users—and rather attractive to less ordinary ones as well. Privacy is a splendid thing. It merely comes with a bill that someone eventually has to pay.
Which makes the timing rather amusing.
Just as Telegram finds itself under increasing scrutiny in India over misuse, WhatsApp decides that one of Telegram’s defining features deserves a permanent place in its own design. Whether this is coincidence, competitive instinct or simply another episode in Meta’s long-running game of “Anything You Can Do, I Can Monetise” scarcely matters. The symbolism is difficult to miss.
To be fair, Meta is not proposing to transform WhatsApp into Telegram overnight. The company promises warnings for unfamiliar contacts, limits on suspicious accounts, protected usernames and various other digital guardrails. Perhaps they will prove entirely effective.
Technology companies, however, possess an almost touching faith that features can be borrowed without importing the habits they encourage. Occasionally they are right. Reels travelled perfectly well from TikTok because entertainment is wonderfully portable.
Trust is less willing to travel.
People do not rely on WhatsApp because it is exciting. Quite the opposite. They rely on it because it is gloriously predictable. Your family uses it. Your colleagues use it. Your bank uses it. It occupies the sort of unremarkable place in modern life that only genuinely successful products ever achieve.
That is a surprisingly fragile achievement.
Every successful company eventually develops feature envy. Rivals always seem to possess one irresistible innovation that simply must be copied. Yet competitors’ strengths frequently arrive attached to competitors’ weaknesses. It is rather like admiring your neighbour’s sports car while overlooking the repair bills.
WhatsApp became indispensable precisely because it resisted the temptation to become everything else. It would be an oddly self-defeating form of progress if, in trying to become a little more like Telegram, it also inherited the reasons so many people prefer that it wasn’t.
Dear WhatsApp, by all means innovate. Just remember that the quickest way to lose your identity is to spend too long borrowing somebody else’s.
