WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an instant messaging (IM) and Voice over IP (VoIP) service owned by technology group Meta. Users can share pictures, documents, consumers locations, and other content, as well as send text, voice, and video messages and make voice and video calls.
WhatsApp‘s client application runs on mobile devices and can be accessed from computers, a cellular mobile telephone number is needed to sign up for this service. In January 2018, WhatsApp launched a standalone business app called WhatsApp Business, which can interact with standard WhatsApp clients.
The service was created by WhatsApp Inc. of Mountain View, California, which Was bought by Facebook in February 2014 for about US$19.3 billion.
History of WhatsApp
2009–2014
WhatsApp was founded in February 2009 by former Yahoo employees Brian Acton and John Kom. A month ago, when Kom bought the iPhone, he and Acton decided to create an app for the App Store. The idea started as an app that would display status in the phone’s Contacts menu, showing whether a person is at work or on a call.
Their conversations were often held at the home of Kom’s Russian friend Alex Fishman in western San Jose. They felt that to take the idea further, they would need an iPhone developer. Fishman visited RentACoder.com, found Russian developer Igor Solomon, and introduced him to Kom.
Kom has named the app WhatsApp, which sounds like “What’s going on”. On February 24, 2009, he joined WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Kom considered giving up and looking for a new job.
In June 2009, when the app was downloaded by only a handful of Fishman’s Russian-speaking friends, Apple issued push notifications, allowing users to ping even if they didn’t use the app.
Com updated WhatsApp to notify everyone in the user’s network when the user’s status changes. To surprise Kom, the new feature was used by users to “type each other humorously, such as ‘I woke up late’ or ‘I’m on my way’.
WhatsApp 2.0, which was released for the iPhone in August 2009, included a messaging component designed for purpose.
In October 2009, Acton persuaded five of Yahoo’s former friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became the co-founder and was given a stake. He formally joined WhatsApp on November 1. Kom then hired one of his friends, Chris Pfeiffer, in Los Angeles to produce the BlackBerry version, which came two months later. Subsequently, WhatsApp was added in May 2010 for Symbian OS and in August 2010 for Android OS. In 2010, Google made several offers for WhatsApp, which were rejected.
To cover the cost of sending confirmation messages to users, payments were made by replacing WhatsApp with a free service. In December 2009, the ability to send images was added to the iOS version. As of early 2011, WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps in the U.S. Apple App Store.
In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiations by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.
As of February 2013, WhatsApp had nearly 200 million active users and 50 staff members. In 2013, WhatsApp acquired Santa Clara-based startup Sky Mobius, the developers of video and voice calling app Tok.
In December 2013, WhatsApp claimed in a blog post that 400 million active users use the service every month. The year 2013 ended with an expenditure of $148 million, of which $138 million was in deficit.
2014–2015
On February 19, 2014, a year after a venture capital financing round worth $1.5 billion, Facebook Inc. announced that it was buying WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its biggest acquisition to date. At the time, it was the largest acquisition of the venture capital-backed company in history. Sequoia Capital earned about 5,000% profit on its initial investment.
Allen & Co had advised Facebook to pay $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and an additional $3 billion in limited stock units given by Morgan Stanley to WhatsApp founders Kom and Acton. The employee stock was to be more than four years old after closure. A few days after this announcement, WhatsApp users faced loss of service, which led to a wave of anger on social media.
The acquisition was inspired by data provided by Facebook’s research app Onvo, which monitors trends in social activity on mobile phones, as well as startups that were performing “exceptionally well.”
This acquisition caused many users to try, or move to, other message services. Telegram claimed that it gained 8 million new users; and line, 2 million.
In a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp is closely related to Internet.org vision.
He said the aim is to develop a group of basic internet services that will be free to use – “911 for the Internet”. It could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe other things like search and weather. Providing customers with a bundle of them free will work like a gateway drug — users who may be able to buy data services and phones these days just don’t see the point of why they’ll pay for these data services.
Three days after fakebook’s purchase was announced, Kom said they are working to introduce voice calls. He also said that new mobile phones will be sold in Germany with the WhatsApp brand and their ultimate goal is to be on all smartphones.
In August 2014, WhatsApp was the world’s most popular messaging app with more than 600 million users. As of early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly users and more than 30 billion messages per day.
In April 2015, Forbes predicted that between 2012 and 2018, the telecommunications industry would lose $386 billion due to “over-the-top” services such as WhatsApp and Skype. The number of WhatsApp users this month was more than 800 million. By September 2015, this had increased to 900 million. and one billion by February 2016.
On November 30, 2015, the Android WhatsApp client made links to the messaging service Telegram inaccessible and uncopiable. Several sources confirmed that this was intentional, not a bug, and that it was implemented when the Android source code recognizing the Telegram URL was identified. (The word “Telegram” appeared in WhatsApp code.) Some called it an anti-competitive move. WhatsApp did not offer any explanation.
2016–2019
On January 18, 2016, WhatsApp co-founder John Comey announced that he would no longer charge users a one-dollar annual subscription fee, in order to remove the barrier faced by users without a payment card. He also said that the app will not feature any third-party ads, and will have new features such as the ability to interact with businesses.
On May 18, 2017, the European Commission announced that it was imposing a fine of 110 million euros on Facebook for providing misleading information about the capture of WhatsApp in 2014. The commission says that when Facebook purchased the messaging app in 2014, it falsely claimed that it is technically impossible to automatically combine user information from Facebook and WhatsApp.
However, in the summer of 2016, WhatsApp started sharing user information with its parent company, allowing information such as phone numbers to be used for Facebook ads. Facebook acknowledged the breach but said the errors in the 2014 filing were not intentional.
In September 2017, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton left the company and started a non-profit group, which was later revealed as signal foundation, which developed WhatsApp‘s rival Signal. He explained the reasons for leaving the country in an interview with Forbes a year later.
WhatsApp also announced an upcoming business platform to enable companies to provide large-scale customer service, and airlines KLM and Aero Mexico announced their participation in the testing. The two airlines had earlier launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform.
In April 2018, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO John Kom announced his decision to leave the company. Acton and Com gave up $1.3 billion of non-investor stock options after Facebook left the country before November 2018 due to privacy, advertising and monetization concerns. Facebook later announced that Kom’s replacement would be Chris Daniels.
On November 25, 2019, WhatsApp announced an investment of $250,000 through a partnership with Startup India to provide $500 worth of Facebook advertising credits to 500 startups.
In December 2019, WhatsApp announced that a new update would lock apple users who had not updated on iOS 9 or higher and Samsung, Huawei, Sony and Google users who did not update to version 4.0 until February 1, 2020. The company also said that the Windows Phone operating system will not be supported after December 31, 2019. WhatsApp was ranked as the third most downloaded mobile phone app of the decade 2010-2019.
Since 2020.
In March, WhatsApp partnered with the World Health Organization and UNICEF to provide messaging hotlines for people to get information about the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this month, WhatsApp began testing a feature that would help users learn more about information and context to help combat misinformation.
In January 2021, WhatsApp announced a controversial new privacy policy that allowed WhatsApp to share data with its parent company, Facebook; Due to this, many users left WhatsApp and turned to other services like Signal and Telegram. However, Facebook says that the WhatsApp policy will not apply in the European Union because it violates GDPR rules. Facing criticism, WhatsApp postponed the update to May 15, 2021, but said it had no intention of limiting user functionality, nor users who have not approved the new terms.
On October 4, 2021, Facebook suffered its worst shutdown since 2008, affecting other Facebook-owned platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
In August 2022, WhatsApp launched an integration with Jaimar, which is only available to users in India. Local users can text special numbers in the app to start the purchase process in the app, where they can order food items.
Versions of WhatsApp
WhatsApp Business
Introduction
WhatsApp Business (a messaging application) is another mod of WhatsApp. It is free to use. It is also available for Android and IOS. There are millions of people using this mod of WhatsApp.
Features
WhatsApp Business has many features. It has business profile in which you can add your information like email, website, etc. It is very easy to use. It also very easy for messaging. It also responses automatically. You can also do a group chat in WhatsApp Business
Comparison Chart between WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business
| Features | WhatsApp Business | |
| Personal Messaging | ✓ | ✗ |
| Business Messaging | ✗ | ✓ |
| Business Profile | ✗ | ✓ |
| Automatic Replies | ✗ | ✓ |
| Broadcast Lists | ✓ | ✓ |
| Group Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| End-to-End Encryption | ✓ | ✓ |
| Account Verification | ✗ | ✓ |
| statistics | ✗ | ✓ |
| label | ✗ | ✓ |
| Remove messages | ✗ | ✓ |
Other Articles