WhatsApp Messenger is a Voice over IP (VoIP), freeware, and cross-platform messaging service initiated by Facebook. This app provides the sending of voice calls as well as video calls, text messages, user location, documents, images, and other media. You can run this application on a mobile device, but it is also available from the PC or computers when your smartphone is connected to the Internet.
Jan Koum and Brian Acton founded WhatsApp in 2009; both used to work at Yahoo!. After buying an iPhone and realizing the potential of the app industry on the App Store, Koum visitee Alex Fishman, his friend in West San Jose where the three could discuss “ having statuses next to the individual names of the people,” but it was impossible without the developer of iPhone. Fishman found Igor Solomennikov, a Russian developer on RentACoder.com, and introduced him to Koum. Koum gave the name of the application WhatsApp to sound similar to “What’s Up.”
Koum incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California on 24th February 2009. It is because the prior versions of WhatsApp got stuck or crashed at a specific point, Koum thought like he would give up and start looking for another job. Then Acton motivated him to wait for a few months.
Apple launched push notifications in June 2009, providing the users to be reminded when they would not use the application. Koum made some alterations in WhatsApp so that when the status of a user got changed, there would be a notification appear in the network of every user. WhatsApp 2.0 was released with the number of active users increased up to 250,000 suddenly and a messaging component. The action was not employed and setting another initiative, and he decided to join the company.
Acton convinced the five friends in Yahoo to invest about 250,000 dollars in seed funding, and He became the co-founder.
Acton joined on November officially. After some months at the beta stage, the app launched exclusively on the App Store for iPhone in November 2009. Koum hired one of his friends, Chris Peiffer who lived in Los Angeles for developing the BlackBerry version, which came two months later. WhatsApp was changed from a free service to paid one for avoiding spreading too fast, primarily because the primary cost sent verification texts to the users.
In December 2009, the ability to send photos was added to WhatsApp for the iPhone.
By early 2011, WhatsApp was among the top 20 applications in the U.S App Store in Apple. Sequoia Capital invested almost 8 million dollars for more than 15 percent of the firm in April 2011, after several months of discussion with Jim Goetz, the Sequoia partner.
In 2013 the WhatsApp application was installed in 90% of all the smartphones in Israel with the daily use of 86% of all the users as reported by Globes.
WhatsApp had almost 50 staff members and 200 million active users by February 2013. Sequoia invested another amount of 50 million dollars, and WhatsApp valued at 1.5 billion dollars
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.
Several months after a venture capital that finances around at a 1.5 billion dollars valuation, Facebook announced that it acquired WhatsApp for 19 billion US dollars, its biggest acquisition to date. At that time, the addition was the biggest purchase of in the history related to the venture-backed company. Sequoia Capital got 50x in return on its first investment. Facebook, advised by Allen & Co, paid an additional 3 billion dollars in the restricted stock units granted to Koum and Acton, founders of WhatsApp, 12 billion dollars in Facebook shares and 4 billion dollars in cash.
In August 2014, over 600 million active users reported on WhatsApp, and it became famous around the globe as mostly used messaging app. An update was also announced by WhatsApp which purpose was to support Android Wear Smartwatches.
In November 2014, a partnership was made between WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems to provide end to end encryption by using WhatsApp client platform to incorporate encryption protocol utilized in the Signal.
In the early stage of 2015, the popularity of WhatsApp keeps on going as 30 billion messages being sent every day with 700 million active users. In this stage, the WhatsApp web introduced as the user can also use WhatsApp on the respective browser by connecting the mobile device via QR code.
A voice calling feature was introduced in February 2015 as it proves to be a different kind of segment for its users and this feature attracted many of the active users around the globe
In April 2015 WhatsApp users counted increase up to 800 million, and in that time it was reported that OTT services like WhatsApp caused a massive loss for telecommunication industry over 350 billion dollars from 2012 to 2018.
By the time to time WhatsApp users base had grown as in September 2015 nearly 100 million more users were reported on WhatsApp as the total active user's count went up to 900 million
On 30th of November 2015, A link setup introduced for the Android user as through WhatsApp user can link other messenger called as telegram uncopyable. Multiple sources have confirmed that it is an active block through which URLs have been identified through source code.
Co-founder of WhatsApp Jan Koum announced on January 18, 2016, that the annual service subscription of 1 dollar would not be charged as it seems to be a barrier for that user who doesn’t have any payment source for this service. He also said that nearly new features would be announced for the users to communicate easily with every sort of business organizations and there will be no third party advertisement
In February 2016 a huge turnaround was made throughout the globe as the active users on WhatsApp reached 1 billion.
It was reported in April 2016 that end to end encryption addition ended by both companies in every sort of communication on WhatsApp and there would no essential verification process for the users. A report announced in which it said that WhatsApp calls are encrypted with SRTP, WhatsApp messages are encrypted with Signal Protocol and communication of all client servers were encrypted with a separate layered encrypted channel.
Many scams and frauds reported throughout the history of WhatsApp. In May 2016 WhatsApp Gold which was a third party application tricked the users, and they published into downloading this scam app which was separated from WhatsApp.
According to the company blog post in June 2016, more than 100 voice calls made per day on WhatsApp.
In November 2016 video call feature was introduced by WhatsApp for all kind of phones such as Window phones, iPhone or any other Android Beta Version devices.
It was WhatsApp 8th birthday on the 24th of February 2017. Similar to Facebook and Snapchat stories WhatsApp introduced a new Status feature.
For misleading European Commission during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014 Facebook was fined €110 million as reported on May 18, 2017. The Commission further explained that Facebook claimed falsely that it is impossible, but WhatsApp began sharing information such as contact numbers for advertisement on Facebook.
In July 2017, WhatsApp received permission from the National Payments Corporation of India to make partnerships with multiple banks. WhatsApp payment was the first launch in India which was a peer to peer money transfer process. By the assistance of United, payments interface a user is allowed to perform money transfer and app payments as United Payment Interface doesn’t need any details of the bank as it readily enables the mobile app to transfer from account to account.
In September 2017 Brian Acton the co-founder of WhatsApp left the company to start a nonprofit Signal Foundation as revealed by reports. Therefore a business platform was then introduced by WhatsApp in which users get customer service at scale by different companies. Aeromexico and Airlines KLM who launched Facebook Messenger platform services also agreed to participate in testing.
Delete message option was reported in November 2017 as it enables the users to delete the message within a frame of 7 minutes mistakenly sent and the receiver would not be able to see that deleted message.
For small business utilization, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp business in January 2018. Support for older window phones and black beery phones dropped, and for Nokia Series 40 the subsidy was extended for one year.
In April 2018 Jan Koum The CEO and Co-founder of WhatsApp announced that he would be leaving WhatsApp company and the replacement would be Chris Daniels announced later by Facebook.
In July 2018, it announced that WhatsApp would soon support all KaIOS feature phones. WhatsApp also spread the reporting of loud and vulgar messages knowledge worldwide as there were a series of unfortunate incidents in which people severely accused through WhatsApp fraudulent messages.
WhatsApp introduced a feature of video and audio call later in September 2018 as more than two users can contact through video call on WhatsApp as group video call feature also introduced.
On February 28, 2019, the New York Times reported that Facebook was “hoping to succeed where Bitcoin failed” by developing an in-house cryptocurrency that would be incorporated into WhatsApp.