WhatsApp Wikipedia

This new facility, to Koum’s surprise, was used by users to ping “each other with jokey custom statuses like, ‘I woke up late’ or ‘I’m on my way.'” Fishman said, “At some point it sort of became instant messaging”. In June 2009, when the app had been downloaded by only a handful of Fishman’s Russian-speaking friends, Apple launched push technology, allowing users to be pinged even when not using the app. WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger), owned by Meta Platforms, is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and Voice over IP (VoIP) service accessible via desktop and mobile app.

Platform support

In September 2022, a critical security issue in WhatsApp’s Android video call feature was reported. This is reportedly not an isolated occurrence, as federal agencies can use the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to covertly track users without submitting any probable cause or linking a user’s number to their identity. The app collected data on who the users contacted and how often, and when and how they were using the app. In January 2022, an unsealed surveillance application revealed that WhatsApp started tracking seven users from China and Macau in November 2021, based on a request from US DEA investigators. As the complaint was heavily redacted due to being an ongoing case, it did not disclose whether this was alleged tampering vegas casino apk with the app’s end-to-end encryption, or Google accessing user backups.clarification needed 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.

Security and privacy

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.

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.

Murders in India

In January 2021, WhatsApp announced a controversial new privacy policy allowing WhatsApp to share data with its parent company, Facebook. In April 2018, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum announced he would be leaving the company. Both airlines had previously launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform. WhatsApp also announced a forthcoming business platform to enable companies to provide customer service at scale, and airlines KLM and Aeroméxico announced their participation in the testing.

In May 2025, Meta reported WhatsApp had over 3 billion monthly active users globally. On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. The hack, allegedly developed by Israeli surveillance technology firm NSO Group, injected malware onto WhatsApp users’ phones via a remote-exploit bug in the app’s Voice over IP calling functions. An integer overflow bug allowed a malicious user to take full control of the victim’s application once a video call between two WhatsApp users was established.

The acquisition was influenced by the data provided by Onavo, Facebook’s research app for monitoring competitors and trending usage of social activities on mobile phones, as well as startups that were performing “unusually well”. The idea started off as an app that would display statuses in a phone’s Contacts menu, showing if a person was at work or on a call. The service was created by WhatsApp Inc. of Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion.

Version 25.35.72

In December 2023, WhatsApp’s “View Once” feature expanded to include voice messages. This lets users share videos of themselves more quickly, and without adding anything to their device’s gallery. By June 2016, the company’s blog reported more than 100 million voice calls per day were being placed on WhatsApp. In October 2024, WhatsApp expanded their chat filter feature, adding the ability for users to create custom lists that contain specific chats of their choice. In October 2020, WhatsApp rolled out a feature allowing users to mute both individuals and group chats forever.

In November 2025, WhatsApp announced that they would update their About feature, which allows users to add a short message to explain what they are doing. In December 2024, WhatsApp introduced a reverse image search feature, allowing users to verify image authenticity directly within the app using Google Search. The company also announced plans to implement reactions, the ability for administrators to delete messages in groups and voice calls up to 32 participants.

• In August 2021, WhatsApp launched a feature that allows chat history to be transferred between mobile operating systems.
• 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.
• In November 2025, WhatsApp announced that they would update their About feature, which allows users to add a short message to explain what they are doing.
• The messages involved discussing how to make an explosive device and a confession to the attack.
• In October 2023, support for logging in to multiple (meaning two) accounts was added, allowing users to switch between different WhatsApp accounts in the same app.

He also said that the app would not display any third-party ads, and that it would have new features such as the ability to communicate with businesses. In April 2015, Forbes predicted that between 2012 and 2018, the telecommunications industry would lose $386 billion because of “over-the-top” services like WhatsApp and Skype. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to pay for more services like this – or so the hope goes. These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. The idea, he said, is to develop a group of basic internet services that would be free of charge to use – “a 911 for the internet”.

• By February 2017, WhatsApp had over 1.2 billion users globally, reaching 1.5 billion monthly active users by the end of 2017.
• By June 2016, the company’s blog reported more than 100 million voice calls per day were being placed on WhatsApp.
• 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.
• At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day.

This was implemented only on Samsung phones, with plans to expand to Android and iOS “soon”. In August 2021, WhatsApp launched a feature that allows chat history to be transferred between mobile operating systems. Previously between March 2016 and May 2017, only limited file types categorised as images (JPG, PNG, GIF), videos (MP4, AVI), and documents (CSV, DOC/DOCX, PDF, PPT/PPTX, RTF, TXT, XLS/XLSX), were allowed to be shared for file attachments. In July 2017, WhatsApp added support for file uploads of all file types, with a limit of 100 MB. Voice messages sent this way are deleted after the recipient listens to them the first time.

About this app

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. In August 2013, WhatsApp added voice messages to their apps, giving users a way to send short audio recordings directly in their chats. WhatsApp has rolled out a feature called ‘Voice Status Updates’, which allows users to record voice notes and share them as their status on the app. Providing a bundle of these free of charge to users will work like a gateway drug of sorts – users who may be able to afford data services and phones these days just don’t see the point of why they would pay for those data services. WhatsApp 2.0, released for iPhone in August 2009, featured a purpose-designed messaging component; the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000.

In May 2014, WhatsApp crossed 50 million monthly active users in India, which is also its largest country by the number of monthly active users, then 70 million in October 2014, making users in India 10% of WhatsApp’s total user base. By February 2017, WhatsApp had over 1.2 billion users globally, reaching 1.5 billion monthly active users by the end of 2017. At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day.

In May 2019, WhatsApp was attacked by hackers who installed spyware on a number of victims’ smartphones. Higher usage was reported by frontline clinical staff to keep up with care needs, even though NHS trust policies do not permit their use. Further, the Cabinet Office had claimed that since many messages were not relevant to the inquiry, it only needed to hand over material it had selected as being relevant. A personal device of the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had been compromised by a security breach, and it was claimed that it could not be switched on to recover messages. The researchers notified, Meta (who updated the enumeration problem in October), and deleted their copy of the phone numbers. On November 29, 2021, an FBI document was uncovered by Rolling Stone, revealing that WhatsApp responds to warrants and subpoenas from law enforcement within minutes, providing user metadata to the authorities.

Data Not Linked to You

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.

Similar apps

Similarly to WhatsApp for web, Windows, Mac, and smartwatches, the iPad is a type of linked device that connects and syncs to WhatsApp running on a smartphone. WhatsApp has been officially supported for iPads and its iPadOS since May 27, 2025. The Windows version is based on UWP while the Mac version is a port of the iOS version using Catalyst technology.

India

WhatsApp Payments (marketed as WhatsApp Pay) is a peer-to-peer money transfer feature. On October 14, 2021, WhatsApp rolled out end-to-end encryption for backups on Android and iOS. According to a white paper that was released along with the announcement, WhatsApp messages are encrypted with the Signal Protocol.