Really? I'm a native Spanish speaker, and the first thing I thought when learning about the app was that[1] ad.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W16qzZ7J5YQ

(Forgive me, it was still recent around here at the time the app got popular).

I don't even have to open the link to know that it's that budweiser ad. That's where my mind goes too when I think about the name of the app.

I think whatsapp has a nice ring to it, even if people doesn't know how to write it. Surely being able to write it on a store search is important, but not as important as sounding good.

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And does people get the name of Waze? It took me a while, because in this case not being a native English speaker is a real problem.

Also a native English speaker, also had no idea it was supposed to be a pun until right now. I just thought it was another silly name from an Asian company.

Complete tangent, but, by any chance, when you read things, do you not 'hear' a voice in your head reading them?

Curious, because I'm pretty sure the first time I ran across Whatsapp it was in text, but I tend to 'hear' the things I read/write in my head, as though a voice read them to me. And because of that the pun stuck out. It might just be I'm more inclined to look for puns (playing games with them all the time with friends and family), but wondering if that might be part of it: if you just see the name and it's just a word, not something sounded out in your head, you of course would not notice the play on words.

85% of people hear their voice when reading / forming thoughts.

And then there are the others [1].

1 https://twitter.com/KylePlantEmoji/status/122171379291396506...

I don't think that's it, I hear words in my head, but didn't get the pun until I watched a Jimmy Fallon bit where he made fun of the name.

Following on this train, as an fluent English speaker, millennial, Asian American that grew up in Texas public school all my life, and a lover of memes and puns...I also didn't realize WhatsApp was a pun...woah.

Well that proves it, it's not a great name :)

Are you thinking of Wechat? Whatsapp is run by Facebook.

As a nonuser of WhatsApp, I don't care who owns it. Thinking the app comes from Asia is understandable; There's a large number of apps coming from Asia whose names sound nonsensical in the West (quite likely some of them have as much meaning as our own apps have, and are just foreign words or sounds). There's not many apps coming from Africa or South America these days (that I'm aware of), while Asia has quite a lot.