(The word “telegram” appeared in WhatsApp’s code.) Some considered it an anti-competitive measure; WhatsApp offered no explanation. In April 2015, Forbes predicted that between 2012 and 2018, the telecommunications industry would lose $386 billion because of “over-the-top” services like WhatsApp and Skype. He also said that new mobile phones would be sold in Germany with the WhatsApp brand, and that their ultimate goal was to be on all smartphones.
WhatsApp also announced a forthcoming business platform to enable companies to provide customer service at scale, and airlines KLM and Aeroméxico announced their participation in the testing. 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. Three days after announcing the Facebook purchase, Koum said they were working to introduce voice calls. These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather.
Touring Europe, Blanchard demonstrated his balloons and showcased the modern parachute, which he later used for a successful escape in 1793 when his hydrogen balloon ruptured. She died in Paris on July 16, 1819, falling out of her balloon to her death after fireworks set it on fire. His wife, Marie, continued ballooning and became Europe’s best-known female vegas casino app aeronaut. He fell more than 50 feet from the balloon and never recovered from his injuries. In 1808, Blanchard had a heart attack while on his 60th flight, over The Hague, in the Netherlands.
- Local users can text special numbers in the app to launch an in-app shopping process, where they can order groceries.
- Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age.
- The first successful manned balloon flight took place on 21 November 1783, when Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes took off at the Palace of Versailles in a free-flying hot air balloon constructed by the Montgolfier brothers.
- In December 2021, WhatsApp changed the default setting from “everyone” to only people in the user’s contacts or who have been conversed with (“nobody” is also an option).
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Though several people asked to join him in the balloon, Blanchard insisted on ascending solo. He also hoped to charge people $5 to watch his takeoff, but since the balloon would be visible outside the prison as soon as it ascended, only about 100 people bought tickets, even after Blanchard lowered the price to $2. For weeks, Blanchard ran an ad in Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, announcing his intention to ascend over Philadelphia in his balloon on January 9, 1793. A basket attached to a parachute and containing a small animal, probably a dog, was dropped from a balloon and landed safely.
- 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
- Since the complete roll out of this feature, users cannot check old messages before this period on the Web version anymore.
- In August of 1785, Blanchard became the first aeronaut to travel more than 200 kilometers in the air with a flight from Lille to Servon.
- Open Whisper Systems said that they had already incorporated the protocol into the latest WhatsApp client for Android, and that support for other clients, group/media messages, and key verification would be coming soon after.
Voice and video calling and notes
Koum then hired a friend in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop a BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later. Although Acton was working on another startup idea, he decided to join the company. Koum updated WhatsApp so that everyone in the user’s network would be notified when a user’s status changed. However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job. Koum named the app WhatsApp to sound like “what’s up” and it was published on the Apple App Store and BlackBerry App World in May and June 2009 respectively. A month earlier, after Koum purchased an iPhone, he and Acton decided to create an app for the App Store.
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. 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. 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.
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Search for archived messages. His widow continued to support herself with ballooning demonstrations until doing so also killed her. He fell from the balloon and died roughly a year later on 7 March 1809 due to severe injuries. On 20 February 1808 Blanchard had a heart attack while in his balloon at The Hague. One of the flight’s witnesses that day was President George Washington, and the future presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were also present. He launched his balloon from the prison yard of Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and landed at the Clement Oak in Deptford Township, New Jersey.
– Flights in Paris
By April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos were being shared daily, and the messaging system was handling more than 10 billion messages each day. In May 2016, some WhatsApp users were reported to have been tricked into downloading a third-party application called WhatsApp Gold, which was part of a scam that infected the users’ phones with malware. Since the complete roll out of this feature, users cannot check old messages before this period on the Web version anymore.
End-to-end encryption
In 2016, WhatsApp was accused of copying features from a then-unreleased version of iMessage. 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. By February 2017, WhatsApp had over 1.2 billion users globally, reaching 1.5 billion monthly active users by the end of 2017.
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The service became generally available in India and Brazil, and in Singapore for WhatsApp Business transactions only. WhatsApp Payments (marketed as WhatsApp Pay) is a peer-to-peer money transfer feature. WhatsApp calls are encrypted with SRTP, and all client-server communications are “layered within a separate encrypted channel”. According to a white paper that was released along with the announcement, WhatsApp messages are encrypted with the Signal Protocol. WhatsApp confirmed the partnership to reporters, but there was no announcement or documentation about the encryption feature on the official website, and further requests for comment were declined.
About this 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. 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. In November 2019, WhatsApp released a new privacy feature that let users decide who can add them to groups. 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.
An integer overflow bug allowed a malicious user to take full control of the victim’s application once a video call between two WhatsApp users was established. 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 November 2017, WhatsApp implemented a feature giving users seven minutes to delete messages sent by mistake. In November 2025, WhatsApp announced that they would update their About feature, which allows users to add a short message to explain what they are doing. In December 2024, WhatsApp introduced a reverse image search feature, allowing users to verify image authenticity directly within the app using Google Search. In July 2021 the company was also testing multi-device support, allowing computer users to run WhatsApp without an active phone session.
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. As of May 2025, the service had 3 billion monthly active users, making it the most used messenger app. WhatsApp has increasingly drawn its innovation from competing services, such as a Telegram-inspired web version and features for groups. In May 2025, Meta reported WhatsApp had over 3 billion monthly active users globally. On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. However, the company did not reveal the names of the end users, which according to research by Citizen Lab include, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.
Security and encryption
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). The WebView2-based app has been criticised for its sluggish performance, high RAM usage, and requirement to keep the app running in the background to receive push notifications, compared to the previous native version. In 2023, WhatsApp replaced the Electron-based apps with native versions for their respective platforms. Similar to the WhatsApp Web format, the app, which synchronises with a user’s mobile device, is available for download on the website. Previously the WhatsApp user’s handset had to be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function but as of an update in October 2021 (and integrated by default in WhatsApp as of April 2022) that is no longer the case.
The enforcement of the privacy policy was postponed from February 8 to May 15, 2021, WhatsApp announced they had no plans to limit the functionality of the app for those who did not approve the new terms. Previously, users could opt-out of such data sharing, but the new policy removed this option. In January 2021, WhatsApp announced an updated privacy policy which stated that WhatsApp would share user data with Facebook and its “family of companies” beginning February 2021.
Clothing au ballon was produced with exaggerated puffed sleeves, rounded skirts, or with printed images of balloons. Blanchard intended to “row” northeast to La Villette but the balloon was pushed by the wind across the Seine to Billancourt and back again, landing in the rue de Sèvres. Married to Sophie Blanchard in 1804, Blanchard suffered a fatal heart attack in his balloon in 1808, with his widow continuing balloon demonstrations until her accidental death.
The message reportedly contained a malicious file, the receipt of which resulted in Bezos’ phone being hacked. According to WhatsApp, the exploit “targeted at least 100 human-rights defenders, journalists and other members of civil society” among a total of 1,400 users in 20 countries. In 2018, it was reported that around 500,000 National Health Service (NHS) staff used WhatsApp and other instant messaging systems at work and around 29,000 had faced disciplinary action for doing so.
In December 2019, WhatsApp announced that a new update would lock out any Apple users who had not updated to iOS 9 or higher and Samsung, Huawei, Sony and Google users who had not updated to version 4.0 by February 1, 2020. In August 2014, WhatsApp was the most popular messaging app in the world, with more than 600 million users. 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. WhatsApp 2.0, released for iPhone in August 2009, featured a purpose-designed messaging component; the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000.