WhatsApp - Fun Facts
WhatsApp from Meta is a free messaging and video calling app. It’s used by over 2B people in more than 180 countries.
* WhatsApp was launched in May 2009 by Brian Acton (born 1972) and Jan Koum (born 1976). Koum chose the name WhatsApp because it sounded like "what's up". 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.
* Apple introduced push technology in June 2009, enabling users to receive notifications even when not actively using the app. Koum modified WhatsApp so that everyone in a user's network would be alerted when their status changed. Surprisingly, users began using this feature to send playful custom statuses like "I woke up late" or "I'm on my way" to each other.
* After becoming a computer science graduate from Stanford University, Brain Acton tested products at the Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems, before joining Yahoo as its 44th employee in 1996 where he worked for the next decade. In 1998, Jan Koum was hired by Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer. In September 2007, Koum and Acton left Yahoo! and took a year off. Both applied to work at Facebook but were rejected. Five years later in February 2014, it was acquired by Facebook (now Meta) for a staggering $19 billion. At the time, this was one of the largest acquisitions of a venture-backed company in history.
* When Facebook acquired WhatsApp, Jan Koum made it a point to sign part of the deal outside a suburban social services center where he had once stood in line for food stamps. Like many in the tech world, Koum is an immigrant. As a teenager, he and his mother moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1990s, partly to escape the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping through his native Ukraine.
* In 2010, Google made multiple acquisition offers for WhatsApp, which were all declined.
* By early 2011, WhatsApp ranked among the top 20 apps in the U.S. Apple App Store.
* WhatsApp handled ten billion messages per day in August 2012, growing from two billion in April 2012. According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines".
* The United Arab Emirates banned WhatsApp video chat and VoIP call apps as early as 2013, reportedly to safeguard the commercial interests of their nationally owned telecom providers, du and Etisalat.
* In August 2014, Koum shared on Twitter that WhatsApp had surpassed 600 million active users worldwide.
* In January 2015, WhatsApp introduced a web client that let users scan a QR code with their mobile app to mirror chats on their browser. The web client wasn’t standalone and needed the phone to stay on and connected to the internet. Initially, it wasn’t available for iOS users due to Apple’s limitations, but since then, support for linked devices has grown.
* In May 2016, the messenger launched for both Microsoft Windows and macOS. Later, support for video and voice calls was added to the desktop clients. WhatsApp for Windows shifted from Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) framework to the Microsoft Edge WebView2 framework, returning to a web-based framework (similar to Electron before) instead of a native one.
* In July 2017, WhatsApp introduced support for file uploads of all types, capped at 100 MB. By May 2022, the upload limit was significantly increased to 2 GB.
* For years, the founders were strongly opposed to advertisements, even displaying a sign in their office that read, "No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!" Although this stance shifted under Meta's ownership with the introduction of WhatsApp Business features, the platform remains less cluttered with ads compared to other social networks. Brian Acton left WhatsApp in September 2017 to create the Signal Foundation, which launched the competing app Signal. He departed after disagreements with Facebook over WhatsApp's monetization, forfeiting $850 million in unvested options by leaving just months before they vested. WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum also left in April 2018 after conflicts with Facebook, stating, "I sold my users' privacy."
* Brian Acton and his wife have donated over $1 billion to charitable causes throughout their lives. Jan Koum has contributed more than $2 million to The FreeBSD Foundation, along with several other causes. Koum has mentioned that he doesn’t consider himself an entrepreneur, as he believes entrepreneurs are driven by the pursuit of profit, while his focus has always been on creating useful products.
* In October 2019, WhatsApp officially launched a new fingerprint app-locking feature for Android users.
* In January 2020, a digital forensic analysis revealed that the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos received an encrypted message on WhatsApp from the official account of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The message reportedly contained a malicious file, the receipt of which resulted in Bezos' phone being hacked.
* In October 2021, WhatsApp rolled out end-to-end encryption for backups on Android and iOS.
* UPI payments via WhatsApp became generally available to everyone in August 2022. WhatsApp launched an integration with JioMart, available only to users in India. Local users can text special numbers in the app to launch an in-app shopping process, where they can order groceries.
* In April 2023, the app rolled out a feature that would allow account access across multiple phones. Linked devices are secondary devices running the WhatsApp messenger software. They link to and sync with WhatsApp actively running on a supported primary phone. Up to four linked devices can be added per user account. Linked devices automatically log out after 14 days of inactivity on the primary phone. Linked devices allow the service to be used on multiple other platforms like desktop computers and smartwatches (e.g. WhatsApp Web, Facebook Portal), but also on other smartphones (called companions).
* 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 its initial years, Whatsapp had a version for BlackBerry & Symbian OS. It was also available later on for Nokia, Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile, Tizen and KaiOS but all of these have been discontinued. WhatsApp is now available on a wide range of mobile and desktop platforms. WhatsApp offers apps for the following operating systems:
- Mobile/Tablet:
- Android
- iOS (iPhone, iOS 12.0 or newer)
- iPadOS (iPad, iPadOS 15.1 or newer)
- Wear OS (Smartwatches with Wear OS 3 or newer)
- watchOS (Apple Watch)
Desktop/Web:
- Windows (Requires Windows 10 or newer)
- Mac (macOS 12.1 or newer)
- WhatsApp Web (accessible through a web browser)
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