Throughout Meta’s Q2 2026 earnings name, Mark Zuckerberg stated that different income within the household of apps section crossed $1 billion, largely due to WhatsApp paid messaging and subscriptions.
As extra companies use WhatsApp to succeed in customers, customers’ inboxes usually get cluttered, making it laborious to seek out private and group messages. Meta is now making an attempt out a brand new characteristic the place it can place messages from bigger companies like banks or airways in a separate folder, TechCrunch has discovered completely.
When a consumer receives a message from a big enterprise, WhatsApp will mechanically transfer that message to a brand new “Affords & Updates” folder after a set variety of hours. The corporate stated it’s testing totally different durations, as much as 24 hours, to maneuver messages to a brand new folder.
Customers preferring their messages to be on the timeline can flip this setting off. Nevertheless, they don’t management when messages are moved mechanically.
Meta stated that with this characteristic, messages like low cost codes and supply updates are out of the inbox in a couple of hours, and the primary chat timeline feels much less cluttered. For companies, which means that customers can search for their messages in a selected folder relatively than getting misplaced in all chats.
WhatsApp is beginning to take a look at this characteristic with choose companions utilizing its WhatsApp Enterprise Platform, and can look to increase based mostly on observations. In the meanwhile, small companies and particular person accounts utilizing WhatsApp Enterprise are exempt from this characteristic. WhatsApp stated it may discover shifting enterprise messages from small companies to the brand new “Affords & Updates” folder sooner or later.
In the previous few years, WhatsApp has taken steps to scale back enterprise message spam. In 2024, it began permitting customers to unsubscribe from marketing messages from brands. Final 12 months, it put a curb on the number of broadcast messages businesses and individuals can ship in a timeframe. In October 2025, it went one step additional and restricted the number of messages businesses could send without getting a response from customers. The corporate has absolutely rolled out the primary two options whereas it’s nonetheless iterating on the third characteristic.
Regardless of these steps, WhatsApp inbox can really feel chaotic. From my very own expertise, there have been days when I’ve cleared unread messages in the beginning of the day solely to finish with greater than 30-40 unread messages. Even on the time of writing, greater than half of my unread messages had been enterprise communications. I’m not alone in feeling this.
The brand new characteristic may cut back the litter slightly, but it surely received’t be efficient till customers have controls over filtering out messages from the primary inbox.
WhatsApp made its AI enterprise brokers out there globally in June, with greater than 1 million companies already utilizing them. In the course of the earnings name, Zuckerberg talked about Brazil’s automotive rental firm Movida and stated that it has seen an uptick in conversions and buyer assist difficulty dealing with by way of AI brokers. Within the coming months, we may see extra companies use AI inside WhatsApp for gross sales, advertising and marketing, and assist use circumstances. A chat app with over 3 billion customers should strike a steadiness between private and enterprise messages earlier than it turns into a car for AI spam.
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