Markdown → WhatsApp

Paste LLM markdown on the left, copy WhatsApp-formatted text on the right.

Input (Markdown)

Output (WhatsApp)

Trip recap

Hey! Quick rundown of the weekend in Lisbon — three highlights:

• Pastéis de nata at Manteigaria (worth the queue)
• Sunset at Miradouro da Senhora do Monte
• ~~Tried~~ Survived the tram 28 ride

Booking link: Airbnb (https://airbnb.com/rooms/123) — or just https://maps.app.goo.gl/example

Useful snippet I shared with the group:


flight: TP223
landing: 19:45
hotel: check-in after 16:00

Ping me on whatsapp if anything changes.

Speculation — not an official answer

Why doesn't WhatsApp just use standard Markdown?

WhatsApp has never publicly explained the choice, and developers who have looked for one keep coming up empty. What follows is informed guesswork, not fact.

Mobile keyboards favour single delimiters

CommonMark uses **bold** and *italic*. On a phone, asterisks live behind a symbols toggle — four taps per bold word is a lot. WhatsApp picked *bold*, _italic_, ~strike~: one character per side, no overlap between marks.

Markdown was built for documents, not chat bubbles

Headings, paragraphs, link references, nested lists — almost none of it maps cleanly to a short message. Adopting the full spec would mean importing a parser and a pile of edge cases to use roughly four features.

Chat had its own conventions first

IRC and early IM clients used *bold* and _italic_ as typographic shorthand long before Markdown existed. Slack, Telegram, Discord and Signal all diverge from CommonMark in different ways — chat apps as a category never standardised on it.

Lock-in came fast

Once shipped to a billion users in 2016, switching to **bold** would have silently broken every older message anyone scrolled back to.

Best honest summary: a mix of thumb-typing ergonomics, inheritance from IRC/IM rather than from Markdown, and not wanting a document-oriented spec for a four-feature use case. Anyone claiming a definitive reason is guessing — including us.