Your own usage
Most people underestimate this by a wide margin. Your phone already tracks it — it takes about thirty seconds to look.
You get daily totals, a weekly average, and the hours of day when your usage clusters.
The exact wording varies by manufacturer — Samsung, Xiaomi and others rename it — but every modern Android has some version.
Screen time measures how long the app was in the foreground. That includes plenty of time you would not call messaging:
It also misses things: messages read from notifications without opening the app, and anything done on WhatsApp Web on a laptop, which your phone knows nothing about.
If your number looks lower than expected, WhatsApp Web is usually the reason. Desktop usage is invisible to phone screen time — for many people it is the majority of their messaging.
Total minutes is the shallowest possible measure of messaging. It cannot tell you:
If you look at one thing beyond total time, make it the ratio of messages you send to messages you receive, per conversation.
It is the closest thing to an objective measure of who is driving a relationship, and it is usually the number that surprises people most — in both directions. Volume tells you how busy you are. Direction tells you what kind of busy.
WaTrue turns a linked WhatsApp account's activity into online-time curves and hourly patterns. Live demo with sample data, no sign-up.