WhatsApp Messenger is a freeware and cross-platform messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) service owned by Facebook. The application allows the sending of text messages and voice calls, as well as video calls, images and other media, documents, and user location. The application runs from a mobile device but is also accessible from desktop computers; the service requires consumer users to provide a standard cellular mobile number. Originally, users could only communicate with others individually or in groups of individual users, but in September 2017, WhatsApp announced a forthcoming business platform that will enable companies to provide customer service to users at scale.
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. By February 2018, WhatsApp had a user base of over one and a half billion, making it the most popular messaging application at the time. WhatsApp has grown in multiple countries, including Brazil, India, and large parts of Europe, including United Kingdom and France.
Video WhatsApp
History
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. At one point, they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected. For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!.
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".
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.
Facebook subsidiary (2014-present)
On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. At the time, the acquisition was the largest purchase of a venture-backed company in history. Sequoia Capital received an approximate 50x return on its initial investment. 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. Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing. Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.
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. Line claimed to have seen 2 million new users for its service.
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. 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.
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.
In August 2014, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app, with more than 600 million active users. By early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users with over 30 billion messages being sent every day. 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. That month, WhatsApp had over 800 million active users. By September 2015, the user base had grown to 900 million, and by February 2016 it had grown to one billion.
As of November 30, 2015, the Android client for WhatsApp started making links to another messenger called Telegram unclickable and uncopyable. This is an active block, as confirmed by multiple sources, rather than a bug, and the Android source code which recognizes Telegram URLs has been identified. URLs with "telegram" as domain-name are targeted actively and explicitly - the word "telegram" appears in the code. This functioning risks being considered anti-competitive, 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. 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.
By June 2016, more than 100 million voice calls are made per day on WhatsApp according to a post on the company's blog.
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. Also in November 2016, Facebook ceased collecting WhatsApp data for advertising in Europe.
On February 24, 2017, (WhatsApp's 8th birthday), WhatsApp launched a new Status feature similar to Snapchat and Facebook stories.
On May 18, 2017, it was reported that the European Commission was fining Facebook EUR110 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."
In September 2017, WhatsApp announced a forthcoming business platform which will enable companies to provide customer service to users at scale. Airlines KLM and Aeroméxico both announced their participation in the testing. Both airlines had previously launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform.
In January 2018, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Business for small business use.
Maps WhatsApp
SMB and Enterprise platforms
Until 2017, WhatsApp positioned itself as a solution for a single party with a single smartphone to communicate with another such party, enabling small businesses to use the platform to communicate with customers, but not at scale (e.g. in a contact center environment). However, in September 2017 WhatsApp announced what had long been rumored, that they are building and testing new tools for businesses to use WhatsApp:
- a free WhatsApp Business app for small companies and
- an Enterprise Solution for bigger companies operating at a large scale with a global base of customers, like airlines, e-commerce retailers, and banks, who for the first time can offer customer service and conversational commerce (e-commerce via WhatsApp chat (via live agents or chatbots) Note that some companies as far back as 2015 like Meteordesk had provided unofficial solutions for enterprises to attend to large numbers of users, however these setups were shut down by WhatsApp.
Platform support
After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. In January 2010, support for BlackBerry smartphones was added, and subsequently for Symbian OS in May 2010 and for Android OS in August 2010. In August 2011, a beta for Nokia's non-smartphone OS Series 40 was added. A month later, support for Windows Phone was added, followed by BlackBerry 10 in March 2013. In April 2015, support for Samsung's Tizen OS was added. An unofficial port has been released for the MeeGo-based Nokia N9 called Wazapp, as well as a port for the Maemo-based Nokia N900 called Yappari.
The oldest device that was capable of running WhatsApp was the Symbian-based Nokia N95 released in March 2007 (which is no longer functioning as of June 2017).
In August 2014, WhatsApp released an update to its Android app, adding support for Android Wear smartwatches.
In 2014, an unofficial open source plug-in called whatsapp-purple was released for Pidgin, implementing its XMPP and making it possible to use WhatsApp on a Microsoft Windows or Linux PC. WhatsApp responded by automatically blocking phone numbers that connected to WhatsApp using this plug-in.
On January 21, 2015, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Web, a web client which can be used through a web browser by syncing with the mobile device's connection.
On February 26, 2016, WhatsApp announced they would cease support for BlackBerry (including BlackBerry 10), Series 40, and Symbian S60, as well as older versions of Android (2.2), Windows Phone (7.0), and iOS (6), by the end of 2016. BlackBerry, Series 40, and Symbian support was since then extended further to June 30, 2017. In June 2017, support for BlackBerry and Series 40 was once again extended until the end of 2017, while Symbian was dropped.
Support for BlackBerry and older (version 8.0) Windows Phone and older (version 6) iOS devices was dropped on January 1, 2018, but for Nokia Series 40 was extended again, until December 2018. In July 2018, it was announced that WhatsApp will soon be available for KaiOS feature phones.
WhatsApp Web
WhatsApp was officially made available for PCs through a web client, under the name WhatsApp Web, in late January 2015 through an announcement made by Koum on his Facebook page: "Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device--this means all of your messages still live on your phone". The WhatsApp user's handset must still be connected to the Internet for the browser application to function. All major desktop browsers are supported except for Internet Explorer. WhatsApp Web's user interface is based on the default Android one.
As of January 21, 2015, the desktop version was only available to Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone users. Later on, it also added support for iOS, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia S60 (Symbian).
An unofficial derivative called WhatsAppTime has been developed, which is a standard Win32 application for PCs and supports notifications through the Windows notification area. There are similar solutions for macOS, such as the open-source ChitChat, and multiple wrappers available in the App Store.
Microsoft Windows and Mac
On May 10, 2016, the messaging service was introduced for both Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems. WhatsApp currently does not allow audio or video calling from desktop operating systems. Similar to the WhatsApp Web format, the app, which will be synced with a user's mobile device, is available for download on the website. It supports OS versions of Windows 8 and OS X 10.9 and higher.
Technical
WhatsApp uses a customized version of the open standard Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Upon installation, it creates a user account using one's phone number as the username (Jabber ID: [phone number]@s.whatsapp.net).
WhatsApp software automatically compares all the phone numbers from the device's address book with its central database of WhatsApp users to automatically add contacts to the user's WhatsApp contact list. Previously the Android and Nokia Series 40 versions used an MD5-hashed, reversed-version of the phone's IMEI as password, while the iOS version used the phone's Wi-Fi MAC address instead of IMEI. A 2012 update now generates a random password on the server side.
Some Dual SIM devices may not be compatible with WhatsApp, though there are some workarounds for this.
In February 2015, WhatsApp introduced a voice calling feature; this helped WhatsApp to attract a completely different segment of the user population. On November 14, 2016, Whatsapp added video calling feature for users across Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone devices.
On November 2017,Whatsapp released a new feature that would let its users delete messages sent by mistake within a time frame of 7 minutes.
Multimedia messages are sent by uploading the image, audio or video to be sent to an HTTP server and then sending a link to the content along with its Base64 encoded thumbnail (if applicable).
WhatsApp follows a "store and forward" mechanism for exchanging messages between two users. When a user sends a message, it first travels to the WhatsApp server where it is stored. Then the server repeatedly requests the receiver acknowledge receipt of the message. As soon as the message is acknowledged, the server drops the message; it is no longer available in the database of the server. The WhatsApp server keeps the message only for 30 days in its database when it is not delivered (when the receiver is not active on WhatsApp for 30 days).
End-to-end encryption
On November 18, 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the encryption protocol used in Signal into each WhatsApp client platform. 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. 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. In April 2015, German magazine Heise Security used ARP spoofing to confirm that the protocol had been implemented for Android-to-Android messages, and that WhatsApp messages from or to iPhones running iOS were still not end-to-end encrypted. They expressed the concern that regular WhatsApp users still could not tell the difference between end-to-end encrypted messages and regular messages. 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. Users were also given the option to enable a trust on first use mechanism in order to be notified if a correspondent's key changes. According to a white paper that was released along with the announcement, WhatsApp messages are encrypted with the Signal Protocol. WhatsApp calls are encrypted with SRTP, and all client-server communications are "layered within a separate encrypted channel". The Signal Protocol library used by WhatsApp is open-source and published under the GPLv3 license.
Cade Metz, writing in Wired, said, "WhatsApp, more than any company before it, has taken encryption to the masses."
WhatsApp Payments
WhatsApp Payments is a peer-to-peer money transfer feature that is set to launch in India. WhatsApp has received permission from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to enter into partnership with multiple banks in July 2017 to allow users to make in-app payments and money transfers using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). UPI enables account-to-account transfers from a mobile app without having any details of the beneficiary's bank.
Reception and criticism
Security and privacy
Mob murders in India
In July 2018, WhatsApp took action to encourage people to report fraudulent or violent messages after a wave of murders carried out by mobs of people who were falsely accused (via WhatsApp messages) of intending to abduct children.
Alleged vulnerability of encryption
On January 13, 2017, The Guardian reported that security researcher Tobias Boelter had found that WhatsApp's policy of forcing re-encryption of initially undelivered messages, without informing the recipient, constituted a serious loophole whereby WhatsApp could disclose, or be compelled to disclose, the content of these messages. WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems officials disagreed with this assessment. A follow-up article by Boelter himself explains in greater detail what he considers to be the specific vulnerability. In June 2017, The Guardian readers' editor Paul Chadwick wrote, "The Guardian was wrong to report in January that the popular messaging service WhatsApp had a security flaw so serious that it was a huge threat to freedom of speech."
"In a detailed review I found that misinterpretations, mistakes and misunderstandings happened at several stages of the reporting and editing process. Cumulatively they produced an article that overstated its case."
Chadwick also noted that since the Guardian article, WhatsApp has been "better secured by the introduction of optional two-factor verification in February."
Business model
In response to the Facebook acquisition in 2014, Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias questioned whether the company's business model of charging users $1 a year was viable in the United States in the long term. It had prospered by exploiting a "loophole" in mobile phone carriers' pricing. "Mobile phone operators aren't really selling consumers some voice service, some data service, and some SMS service", he explained. "They are selling access to the network. The different pricing schemes they come up with are just different ways of trying to maximize the value they extract from consumers." As part of that, carriers sold SMS separately. That made it easy for WhatsApp to find a way to replicate SMS using data, and then sell that to mobile customers for $1 a year. "But if WhatsApp gets big enough, then carrier strategy is going to change", he predicted. "You stop selling separate SMS plans and just have a take-it-or-leave-it overall package. And then suddenly WhatsApp isn't doing anything." The situation may have been different in countries other than the United States.
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. 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.
Terrorism
In December 2015, it was reported that Islamic State terrorists had been using WhatsApp to plot the November 2015 Paris attacks. ISIL also uses WhatsApp to traffic sex slaves.
In March 2017, U.K. Secretary of State Amber Rudd said encryption capabilities of messaging tools like WhatsApp are unacceptable, as news reported that Khalid Masood used the application several minutes before perpetrating the 2017 Westminster attack. Rudd publicly called for police and intelligence agencies to be given access to WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging services to prevent future terror attacks.
In April 2017, the perpetrator of the Stockholm attack reportedly used WhatsApp to exchange messages with an ISIS supporter shortly before and after the 2017 Stockholm attack. The messages involved discussing how to make an explosive device and a confession of the perpetration the attack.
Scams and malware
It has been asserted that WhatsApp is plagued by scams invites hackers to spread malicious viruses or malware. 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. A message that promises to allow access to their WhatsApp friends' conversations, or their contact lists, has become the most popular hit against anyone who uses the application in Brazil. Since December, 2016, more than 1.5 million people have clicked and lost money
Another application called GB Whatsapp is considered malicious by cybersecurity firm Symantec because it usually performs some unauthorized operations on end-user devices.
Bans
China
In 2017, security researchers reported to The New York Times that the WhatsApp service had been completely blocked in China. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, whose main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009.
Iran
On May 9, 2014, the government of Iran announced that it had proposed to block the access to WhatsApp service to Iranian residents. "The reason for this is the assumption of WhatsApp by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is an American Zionist," said Abdolsamad Khorramabadi, head of the country's Committee on Internet Crimes. Subsequently, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani issued an order to the Ministry of ICT to stop filtering WhatsApp.
Turkey
Turkey temporarily banned WhatsApp in 2016, following the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey.
Brazil
On March 1, 2016, Diego Dzodan, Facebook's vice-president for Latin America was arrested in Brazil for not cooperating with an investigation in which WhatsApp conversations were requested. On March 2, 2016, at dawn the next day, Dzodan was released because the Court of Appeal held that the arrest was disproportionate and unreasonable.
On May 2, 2016, mobile providers in Brazil were ordered to block WhatsApp for 72 hours for the service's second failure to cooperate with criminal court orders. Once again, the block was lifted following an appeal, after nearly 24 hours.
Sri Lanka
WhatsApp, one of the most activated messaging apps along with other social media networks such as Facebook and Instagram were temporarily blocked, banned and had been unavailable for about two days (7-8 March 2018) in certain parts of the country to eradicate communal violences especially the anti-Muslim riots. This was probably the first such instance where social media platforms had been banned in Sri Lanka. The temporal ban was finally lifted on the 14th of March, 2018 around midnight time in Sri Lanka.
Uganda
Government of Uganda banned WhatsApp and Facebook. Users are to be charged 200 shilling according to the new law set by parliament.
User statistics
As of 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.
On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day. With 65 million active users representing 10% of the total worldwide users, India has the largest number of consumers.
In May 2017, it was reported that WhatsApp users spend over 340 million minutes on video calls each day on the app. This is the equivalent of roughly 646 years of video calls per day.
As of February 2017, WhatsApp has over 1.2 billion users globally.
Israel is one of WhatsApp's strongest markets in terms of penetration. According to Globes, already by 2013 the application was installed on 92% of all smartphones, with 86% of users reporting daily use. WhatsApp's group chat feature is reportedly used by many Israeli families to stay in contact with each other.
Users in India
- 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.
- In October 2014, WhatsApp crossed 70 million monthly active users in India, which is 10% of its total user base (700 MM).
- In February 2017, WhatsApp crossed 200 million monthly active users in India.
Competition
WhatsApp competes with a number of Asian-based messaging services (that as of 2014, were services like WeChat (468 million active users), Viber (209 million active users) and LINE (170 million active users), WhatsApp handled ten billion messages per day in August 2012, growing from two billion in April 2012, and one billion the previous October. On June 13, 2013, WhatsApp announced that they had reached their new daily record by processing 27 billion messages. According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."
See also
- Comparison of instant messaging clients
- Comparison of VoIP software
- List of most downloaded Android applications
- List of virtual communities with more than 100 million active users
References
External links
- Official website
Source of article : Wikipedia
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