In May 2016, some WhatsApp users were reported to have been tricked into downloading a third-party application called WhatsApp Gold, which was part of a scam that infected the users’ phones with malware. Since the complete roll out of this feature, users cannot check old messages before this period on the Web version anymore. In July 2021 the company was also testing multi-device support, allowing computer users to run WhatsApp without an active phone session.
However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job. Koum named the app WhatsApp to sound like “what’s up” and it was published on the Apple App Store and BlackBerry App World in May and June 2009 respectively. A month earlier, after Koum purchased an iPhone, he and Acton decided to create an app for the App Store. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client.
WhatsApp Web
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. The developer, WhatsApp Inc., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below.
- Later in September 2018, WhatsApp introduced group audio and video call features.
- Unlike other platforms, WhatsApp requires third-party apps to add Stickers to WhatsApp.
- Now, the feature is also made available to iOS users, allowing them to link up to four iPhones.
- Facing criticism, WhatsApp postponed the update to May 15, 2021, and had no plans to limit functionality of users, nor nag users who did not approve the new terms.
- In March 2024, Meta announced that WhatsApp would let third-party messaging services enable interoperability with WhatsApp, a requirement of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Similar to the WhatsApp Web format, the app, which synchronises with a user’s mobile device, is available for download on the website. The desktop version was first only available to Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone users. This ability (named multi-device support) began testing in July 2021 and rolled out to all users in April 2023. In September 2024, WhatsApp expanded support for Meta AI, allowing users to send text and photos to Meta AI to ask questions, identify objects, translate text or edit pictures. In June 2023, a feature called WhatsApp Channels was launched which allows content creators, public figures and organizations to send newsletter-like broadcasts to large numbers of users.
- The Windows version is based on UWP while the Mac version is a port of the iOS version using Catalyst technology.
- In April 2022, WhatsApp announced undated plans to roll out a Communities feature allowing several group chats to exist in a shared space, getting unified notifications and opening up smaller discussion groups.
- In August 2021, WhatsApp launched a feature that allows chat history to be transferred between mobile operating systems.
- However, the company did not reveal names of the end users, which according to a research by Citizen Lab include, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.
WhatsApp was initially criticized for its lack of encryption, sending information as plaintext. Researchers and journalists called on WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook, to adopt measures similar to those adopted in India and restrict the spread of hoaxes and fake news. It was reported that US$3 million was spent in illegal concealed contributions related to this practice.
On February 28, 2019, The New York Times reported that Facebook was “hoping to succeed where Bitcoin failed” by developing an in-house cryptocurrency that would be incorporated into WhatsApp. The service became generally available in India and Brazil, and in Singapore for WhatsApp Business transactions only. WhatsApp Payments (marketed as WhatsApp Pay) is a peer-to-peer money transfer feature.
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The Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) has prohibited local banks from using instant messaging applications like WhatsApp for customer communication. The organization reported a massive drop-off in traffic for the blocked services, though the country’s government made no official statements about the block. In August 2021, the digital rights organization Access Now reported that WhatsApp along with several other social media apps was being blocked in Zambia for the duration of the general election. The ban was prompted by concerns of US authorities potentially accessing user data for such apps because of the CLOUD Act. In December 2021, the Swiss army banned the use of WhatsApp and several other non-Swiss encrypted messaging services by army personnel.
Whatsapp is crashing constantly.
In September 2017 WhatsApp announced a forthcoming business platform which will enable companies to provide customer service to users. According to Globes, already by 2013 the application was installed on 92% of all smartphones, with 86% of users reporting daily use. In May 2025, Meta reported WhatsApp had over 3 billion monthly active users globally.
In August 2021, WhatsApp launched a feature that allows chat history to be transferred between mobile operating systems. In March 2012, WhatsApp improved its location-sharing function, allowing users to share not only their location, but also the location of places, such as restaurants or hotels. Visual effects also became available, adding visual filters to a user’s video feed. In December 2024, WhatsApp introduced several new video calling features, including the ability to select specific participants from a group to make a call, rather than calling all group members. In June 2024, improvements were made to voice and video calls, allowing up to 32 participants in video calls, adding audio to screen sharing, and introducing a new codec to increase call reliability. In November 2023, WhatsApp added a “voice chat” feature for groups with more than 32 members.
The new privacy policy would not apply within the EU, as it is illegal under the GDPR. On December 16, 2020, a claim that WhatsApp gave Google access to private messages was included in the anti-trust case against the latter. In its revelation via documents received from court, the group claimed that the lawsuit brought against the company by WhatsApp threatened to infringe on its clients’ “national security and foreign policy concerns”. For security purposes, since February 1, 2020, WhatsApp has been made unavailable on smartphones using legacy operating systems like Android 2.3.7 or older and iPhone iOS 8 or older that are no longer updated by their providers. The bug was discovered by Check Point in August 2019 and reported to WhatsApp.
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Now, the feature is also made available to iOS users, allowing them to link up to four iPhones. WhatsApp officially rolled out the Companion mode for Android users, allowing linking up to five Android phones to a single account. In April 2023, the app rolled out a feature that would allow account access across multiple phones, in a shift that would make it more like competitors.
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In February 2015, WhatsApp implemented voice calling, which helped WhatsApp to attract a different segment of the user population. Previously the Android and Nokia Series 40 versions used an MD5-hashed, reversed-version of the phone’s IMEI as a password, while the iOS version used the phone’s Wi-Fi MAC address instead of the IMEI. WhatsApp uses a customized version of the open standard Extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP). In July 2025, WhatsApp stopped developing the Windows UWP-based app due to poor support and deprecation of the UWP framework by Microsoft. In 2023, WhatsApp replaced the Electron-based apps with native versions for their respective platforms. Previously the WhatsApp user’s handset had to be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function but as of an update in October 2021 (and integrated by default in WhatsApp as of April 2022) that is no longer the case.
Features
WhatsApp was criticized by security researchers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation for using backups that are not covered by end-to-end encryption and allow messages to be accessed by third-parties. In November 2020, UPI payments via WhatsApp were initially restricted to 20 million users, and to 100 million users in April 2022, and became generally available to everyone in August 2022. The application can store encrypted copies of the chat messages onto the SD card, but chat messages are also stored unencrypted in the SQLite database file “msgstore.db”. WhatsApp confirmed the partnership to reporters, but there was no announcement or documentation about the encryption feature on the official website, and further requests for comment were declined. Open Whisper Systems said that they had already incorporated the protocol into the latest WhatsApp client for Android, and that support for other clients, group/media messages, and key verification would be coming soon after. On November 18, 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the encryption protocol used in Signal into each WhatsApp client platform.
Voice messages sent this way are deleted after the recipient listens to them the first time. Unlike their 32-person group calls, starting a voice chat does not call all group members directly; they instead receive a notification to join the voice chat. Voice calls between two accounts were added to the app in March and April 2015. Edited messages were tagged as “edited” to inform recipients that the content had been modified. In October 2018, the “Swipe to Reply” option was added to the Android beta version, 16 months after it was introduced for iOS.
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By April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos were being shared daily, and the messaging system was handling more than 10 billion messages each day. When this multi-device feature was first introduced to Android and iOS users, it could only show messages for the last three months on the Web version, because the Web version was syncing with the phone. Similar to voice messages, this feature allows users to record and send short videos directly in a chat. This allows users to send messages between other messaging apps and WhatsApp while maintaining end-to-end encryption. In May 2017, it was reported that WhatsApp users spend over 340 million minutes on video calls each day on the app.
The messages involved discussing how to make an explosive device and a confession to the attack. In December 2015, it was reported that terrorist organization ISIS had been using WhatsApp to plot the November 2015 Paris attacks. In its revelation via documents whats the legal drinking age in russia received via court, the group claimed that the lawsuit brought against the company by WhatsApp threatened to infringe on its clients’ “national security and foreign policy concerns”.
Later in September 2018, WhatsApp introduced group audio and video call features. According to the company, messages could be edited within a 15-minute window after being sent. In 2022, WhatsApp added the ability for users to turn off their online status.
There were a series of incidents between 2017 and 2020, after which WhatsApp announced changes for Indian users of the platform that labels forwarded messages as such. On April 5, 2016, WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announced that they had finished adding end-to-end encryption to “every form of communication” on WhatsApp, and that users could now verify each other’s keys. In November 2017, WhatsApp implemented a feature giving users seven minutes to delete messages sent by mistake.
