WhatsApp Messenger is a freeware and cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) service owned by Facebook.[44] The application allows the sending of text messages and voice calls, as well as video calls, images and other media, documents, and user location.[45][46] The application runs from a mobile device though it is also accessible from desktop computers; the service requires[47] consumer users to provide a standard cellular mobile number. Originally users could only communicate with other users individually or in groups of individual users, but in September 2017 WhatsApp announced a forthcoming business platform which will enable companies to provide customer service to users at scale.[42]
WhatsApp Messenger
WhatsApp logo.svg
Developer(s)
WhatsApp Inc.
Initial release
January 2009; 9 years ago
Stable release(s) [±]
iOS 2.18.81 / August 5, 2018; 10 days ago[1]
Android 2.18.230 / August 4, 2018; 11 days ago[2]
Windows Phone 8, Windows 10 Mobile 2.18.52[3]
Symbian 2.16.57[4]
BlackBerry 2.17.2 / June 26, 2016; 2 years ago[5]
Preview release(s) [±]
Android 2.18.239 / August 7, 2018; 8 days ago[6]
Windows Phone 8, Windows 10 Mobile 2.18.112[7]
Written in
Erlang[8]
Operating system
Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, Symbian (there are Windows, macOS and web app clients that work only in presence of a connected mobile app client)
Type
Instant messaging and social media
License
Freeware
Alexa rank
Positive decrease 69 (As of December 2017)[9]
Website
www.whatsapp.com
WhatsApp Inc.
WhatsApp.svg
Type of business
Subsidiary
Founded
February 24, 2009; 9 years ago
Headquarters
Mountain View, California, United States
Founder(s)
Jan Koum
Brian Acton
CEO
Jan Koum
Employees
50[10]
Parent
Facebook
Website
whatsapp.com
Messaging with WhatsApp
The client was created by WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion.[48][49] By February 2018, WhatsApp had a user base of over one and a half billion,[50][38] making it the most popular messaging application at the time.[38][51] WhatsApp has grown in multiple countries, including Brazil, India, and large parts of Europe, including United Kingdom and France.[38]
History
Further information: Timeline of WhatsApp
2009–2014
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both former employees of Yahoo!. After Koum and Acton left Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo traveled to South America to take a break from work.[11] At one point, they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected.[11] For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!.[citation needed]
In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing the potential of the app industry on the App Store, Koum started visiting his friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would discuss "... having statuses next to individual names of the people", but this was not possible without an iPhone developer. Fishman found a Russian developer on RentACoder.com, Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum. Koum named the app "WhatsApp" to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, because early versions of WhatsApp often crashed or got stuck at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".[11]
In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, allowing users to be pinged when they were not using an app. Koum changed WhatsApp so that when a user's status is changed, everyone in the user's network would be notified.[11] WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000. Acton was still unemployed and managing another startup, and he decided to join the company.[11] In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends in Yahoo! to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. He officially joined on November 1.[11] After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired a friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop the BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.[11]
WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009, the ability to send photos was added to WhatsApp for the iPhone. By early 2011, WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.[11]
In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested approximately $8 million for more than 15 percent of the company, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[52][53][54]
By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.[11]
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.[55]
Facebook subsidiary (2014–present)
On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation,[56] Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.[49] At the time, the acquisition was the largest purchase of a venture-backed company in history.[48] Sequoia Capital received an approximate 50x return on its initial investment.[57] Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and (advised by Morgan Stanley) an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders, Koum and Acton.[58] Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing.[49] Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.[59]
The acquisition caused a considerable number of users to move, or try out other message services as well. Telegram claimed to have seen 8 million additional downloads of its app.[60] Line claimed to have seen 2 million new users for its service.[61]
At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.org vision.[62][63] According to a TechCrunch article, Zuckerberg's vision for Internet.org was as follows:
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.' These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. 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. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to paying for more services like this – or so the hope goes.[62]
Just three days after announcing that WhatsApp had been purchased by Facebook, Koum said they were working to introduce voice calls in the coming months. He also advanced that new mobile phones would be sold in Germany with the WhatsApp brand, as their main goal was to be in all smartphones.[64]
In August 2014, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app, with more than 600 million active users.[65] By early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users with over 30 billion messages being sent every day.[66] In April 2015, Forbes predicted that between 2012 and 2018, the telecommunications industry will lose a combined total of $386 billion because of OTT services like WhatsApp and Skype.[67] That month, WhatsApp had over 800 million active users.[68][69] By September 2015, the user base had grown to 900 million,[70] and by February 2016 it had grown to one billion.[71]
As of November 30, 2015, the Android client for WhatsApp started making links to another messenger called Telegram unclickable and uncopyable.[72][73][74] This is an active block, as confirmed by multiple sources, rather than a bug,[74] and the Android source code which recognizes Telegram URLs has been identified.[74] URLs with "telegram" as domain-name are targeted actively and explicitly – the word "telegram" appears in the code.[74] This functioning risks being considered anti-competitive,[72][73][74] and has not been explained by WhatsApp.
Recent (2016–present)
On January 18, 2016, WhatsApp's founder Jan Koum announced that the service would no longer charge their users a $1 annual subscription fee in an effort to remove a barrier faced by some users who do not have a credit card to pay for the service.[75][34] He also explained that the app would not display any third party advertisement and instead would bring new features such as the ability to communicate with business organizations.[71][76]
By June 2016, more than 100 million voice calls are made per day on WhatsApp according to a post on the company's blog.[77]
On November 10, 2016, WhatsApp launched a two-step verification feature in beta for Android users. After enabling this feature, users can add their email address for further protection.[78] Also in November 2016, Facebook ceased collecting WhatsApp data for advertising in Europe.[79]
On February 24, 2017, (WhatsApp's 8th birthday), WhatsApp launched a new Status feature similar to Snapchat and Facebook stories.[80]
On May 18, 2017, it was reported that the European Commission was fining Facebook €110 million for "misleading" it during the 2014 takeover of WhatsApp. The Commission alleged that in 2014, when Facebook acquired the messaging app, it "falsely claimed it was technically impossible to automatically combine user information from Facebook and WhatsApp." However, in the summer of 2016, WhatsApp had begun sharing user information with its parent company, allowing information such as phone numbers to be used for targeted Facebook advertisements. Facebook acknowledged the breach, but said the errors in their 2014 filings were "not intentional."[79]
In September 2017, WhatsApp announced a forthcoming business platform which will enable companies to provide customer service to users at scale.[42] Airlines KLM and Aeroméxico both announced their participation in the testing.[81][82][83][84] Both airlines had previously launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform.
In January 2018, WhatsApp lœ