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. At the time, it was the largest acquisition of a venture-capital-backed company in history. Sequoia Capital received an approximate 5,000% return on its initial investment. Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media. In 2016, WhatsApp was accused of copying features from a then-unreleased version of iMessage.

Supporting Women’s Rights

Higher usage was reported by frontline clinical staff to keep up with care needs, even though NHS trust policies do not permit their use. 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”. WhatsApp Payments (marketed as WhatsApp Pay) is a peer-to-peer money transfer feature. WhatsApp has been officially supported for iPads and its iPadOS since May 27, 2025.

VoiceOver

  • This new encryption feature added an additional layer of protection to chat backups stored either on Apple iCloud or Google Drive.

    • {

  • In 2022, WhatsApp added the ability for users to turn off their online status.

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  • The new privacy policy would not apply within the EU, as it is illegal under the GDPR.

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  • It became the world’s most popular messaging application in 2015, with 900 million users, and had more than 2 billion active users worldwide in February 2020.

    • |}

  • 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.
  • Both Telegram and Signal in particular were reported to get registration spikes during WhatsApp outages and controversies.

In October 2023 they also introduced passkey support, where a user can verify their login with on-device biometrics, rather than SMS. In November 2023, WhatsApp also began rolling out support for sending login codes to a linked email address, rather than via SMS. Voice calls between two accounts were added to the app in March and April 2015.

User statistics

The new privacy policy would not apply within the EU, as it is illegal under the GDPR. 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. In February 2015, WhatsApp implemented voice calling, which helped WhatsApp to attract a different segment of the user population. On November 14, 2016, WhatsApp added video calling for users using Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone devices. This ability (named multi-device support) began testing in July 2021 and rolled out to all users in April 2023. They link to and sync with WhatsApp actively running on a supported primary phone.

Kids in India

    {

  • The messages involved discussing how to make an explosive device and a confession to the attack.

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  • In December 2023, WhatsApp’s “View Once” feature expanded to include voice messages.

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  • 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.

    • |}{

  • In May 2019, WhatsApp was attacked by hackers who installed spyware on a number of victims’ smartphones.

    • |}

  • The desktop version was first only available to Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone users.
  • When a user deletes media for everyone, WhatsApp does not delete images saved in the iOS camera roll and so those users are able to keep the images.

This allows users to send messages between other messaging apps and WhatsApp while maintaining end-to-end encryption. The company also reported that Windows Phone operating systems would no longer be supported after December 31, 2019. WhatsApp was announced to be the 3rd most downloaded mobile phone app of the decade 2010–2019.

BiP – Messenger, Video Call

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  • On June 13, 2013, WhatsApp announced that they had reached their new daily record by processing 27 billion messages.

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  • Both airlines had previously launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform.

    • |}

  • 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 January 2021, WhatsApp announced a controversial new privacy policy allowing WhatsApp to share data with its parent company, Facebook.
  • 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.

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  • A month earlier, after Koum purchased an iPhone, he and Acton decided to create an app for the App Store.

    • |}

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Visual effects also became available, adding visual filters Starzbet to a user’s video feed. In December 2023, WhatsApp’s “View Once” feature expanded to include voice messages. In August 2022, WhatsApp launched an integration with JioMart, available only to users in India.
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Third-party clients

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It allows users to send text messages, voice messages, and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. In January 2018, WhatsApp released a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business which can communicate with the standard WhatsApp client. As of May 2025, the service had 3 billion monthly active users, making it the most used messenger app.
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At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day. 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 May 2019, WhatsApp was attacked by hackers who installed spyware on a number of victims’ smartphones. A Wired report noted the attack was able to inject malware via calls to the targeted phone, even if the user did not answer the call.

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