WhatsApp Wikipedia

Nov

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.

Both airlines had previously launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform.
This lets users share videos of themselves more quickly, and without adding anything to their device’s gallery.
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.
WhatsApp is owned by Meta, whose main social media service Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009.
In November 2024, the ability to transcribe voice messages was added, allowing users to read out what was said in a voice message, rather than listening to the audio.

They link to and sync with WhatsApp actively running on a supported primary phone. Engadget called the revamped feature “WhatsApp’s version of an AIM away message” and likened it to Instagram’s and Facebook’s Notes. Prior to the update, the feature was “largely hidden within the apps menus” and difficult to find, with the reason for updating being that WhatsApp wanted the feature to be used more often.

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 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.

WhatsApp released a statement saying that “the feature is working properly”, and that images stored in the camera roll cannot be deleted due to Apple’s security layers. In September 2019, WhatsApp was criticized for its implementation of a ‘delete for everyone’ feature. In 2016, WhatsApp was widely praised for the addition of end-to-end encryption and earned a 6 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Secure Messaging Scorecard”.

In October 2020, Facebook announced the introduction of pricing tiers for services offered via the WhatsApp Business API, charged on a per-conversation basis. 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 December 2021, the Swiss army banned the use of WhatsApp and several other non-Swiss encrypted messaging services by army personnel.

MAJOR UPDATE

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. In October 2019, WhatsApp officially launched a new fingerprint app-locking feature for Android users. In November 2024, the ability to transcribe voice messages was added, allowing users to read out what was said in a voice message, rather than listening to the audio. In May 2023, WhatsApp allowed users to edit messages, aligning itself with competitors such as Telegram and Signal which already offered this feature.

Dual App – Duo Web Scanner

Unlike messages in groups or private chats, channels are not end-to-end encrypted. Users are able to use an avatar as their profile picture or use it for stickers during instant messaging, similar to those offered by Bitmoji or Memoji. In March 2021, WhatsApp started rolling out support for third-party animated stickers, initially in Iran, Brazil and Indonesia, then worldwide. Unlike other platforms, WhatsApp requires third-party apps to add Stickers to WhatsApp. Since then, linked devices support has expanded and more information is written in the Platform Support part of this article. In November 2023, WhatsApp also began rolling out support for sending login codes to a linked email address, rather than via SMS.

Mods and fake versions

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.

Brazil

At the time, it was the largest acquisition of a venture-capital-backed company in history. On February 19, 2014, one year after the venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms) agreed to acquire the company for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. That year, the company had $148 million in expenses and a net loss of $138 million. In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz. Koum then hired a friend in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop a BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.

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.

Supported Features

WhatsApp uses a “store and forward” mechanism for exchanging messages between two users. Multimedia messages are sent by uploading the image, audio or video to be sent to an HTTP server and then sending a link to the content along with its Base64 encoded thumbnail, vegas casino apk if applicable. On November 14, 2016, WhatsApp added video calling for users using Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone devices. WhatsApp automatically compares all the phone numbers from the device’s address book with its central database of WhatsApp users to automatically add contacts to the user’s WhatsApp contact list. The desktop version was first only available to Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone users. WhatsApp Web is accessed through web.whatsapp.com and access is granted after the user scans their personal QR code through their mobile WhatsApp client.

About this app

In August 2013, WhatsApp added voice messages to their apps, giving users a way to send short audio recordings directly in their chats.
In March 2019, WhatsApp released a guide for users who had installed unofficial modified versions of WhatsApp and warned that it may ban those using unofficial clients.
Koum updated WhatsApp so that everyone in the user’s network would be notified when a user’s status changed.
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.
On November 25, 2019, WhatsApp announced an investment of $250,000 through a partnership with Startup India to provide 500 startups with Facebook ad credits of $500 each.
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.

When a user sends a message, it is stored on a WhatsApp server, which tries to forward it to the addressee, and repeatedly requests acknowledgement of receipt. WhatsApp’s voice codec is Opus, which uses the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) and linear predictive coding (LPC) audio compression algorithms. Some devices using dual SIMs may not be compatible with WhatsApp, though there are unofficial workarounds to install the app.

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. On May 9, 2014, the government of Iran announced that it had proposed to block the access to WhatsApp service to Iranian residents. In September 2017, security researchers reported to The New York Times that the WhatsApp service had been completely blocked in China. Another application called GB WhatsApp is considered malicious by cybersecurity firm Symantec because it usually performs some unauthorized operations on end-user devices. The message reportedly contained a malicious file, the receipt of which resulted in Bezos’ phone being hacked.

Similar apps

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.

It was also not available for iOS users on launch, due to limitations from Apple. The web client was not standalone, and required the user’s phone to stay on and connected to the internet. In a later update on November 30, WhatsApp added a Secret Code feature, which allows those who use locked chats to enter a unique password that hides those chats from view when unlocking the app. In October 2023 they also introduced passkey support, where a user can verify their login with on-device biometrics, rather than SMS.

In November 2019, WhatsApp released a new privacy feature that let users decide who can add them to groups. The feature has to be turned on by the user and provides the option to encrypt the backup either with a password or a 64-digit encryption key. They expressed the concern that regular WhatsApp users still could not tell the difference between end-to-end encrypted messages and regular messages.