Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: Who created Whatsapp?
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.[8] At one point, they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected.[8] For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo!.
India is by far WhatsApp's largest market in terms of total number of users. 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.[181], then 70 million in October 2014, making users in India 10% of WhatsApp's total user base.[182] In February 2017, WhatsApp reached 200 million monthly active users in India.[183]
WhatsApp was initially unpopular, but its fortunes began to turn after Apple added push notification ability to apps in June 2009. Koum changed WhatsApp to "ping" users when they received a message, and soon afterwards he and Fishman's Russian friends in the area began to use WhatsApp as a messaging tool, in place of SMS. The app gained a large user base, and Koum convinced Acton, who was then still unemployed, to join the company. Koum granted Acton co-founder status after Acton managed to bring in $250,000 in seed funding.
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[186]) and LINE (170 million active users[187]), WhatsApp handled ten billion messages per day in August 2012,[188] growing from two billion in April 2012,[189] and one billion the previous October.[190] On June 13, 2013, WhatsApp announced that they had reached their new daily record by processing 27 billion messages.[191] According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp "has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines."[192]
In July 2018, WhatsApp took action to encourage people to report fraudulent or violent messages after a wave of murders carried out by mobs on people who were falsely accused (via WhatsApp messages) of intending to abduct children.[142]
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.[145] WhatsApp[146] and Open Whisper Systems[147] officials disagreed with this assessment. A follow-up article by Boelter himself explains in greater detail what he considers to be the specific vulnerability.[148] 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."[149]
In February 2015, WhatsApp introduced a voice calling feature; this helped WhatsApp to attract a completely different segment of the user population.[124][125] On November 14, 2016, Whatsapp added video calling feature for users across Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone devices.[126][127]
A major privacy and security problem has been the subject of a joint Canadian-Dutch government investigation. The primary concern was that WhatsApp required users to upload their mobile phone's entire address book to WhatsApp servers so that WhatsApp could discover who, among the users' contacts, was available via WhatsApp. While this was a fast and convenient way to quickly find and connect the user with contacts who were also using WhatsApp, it meant that their address book was then mirrored on the WhatsApp servers, including contact information for contacts who were not using WhatsApp. This information, which consisted solely of phone numbers without any additional information such as the name of the contact, was stored in hashed, though not salted, form. Late 2015, the Dutch government released a press-statement claiming that WhatsApp had changed its hashing method, making it much harder to reverse, and thus now fully complies with all rules and regulations.
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.[162][163]
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.[8]
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.
In September 2017 WhatsApp announced the pilot of its new Enterprise solution, the first time large companies would be able to attend to large groups of customers in an approved WhatsApp solution, after WhatsApp banned earlier unofficial solutions. Companies who piloted the solution included airlines Aeromexico, KLM, Latin American online travel agency Despegar and online retailer Linio.
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.[131] 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.[132] 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.[133] 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.[134] They expressed the concern that regular WhatsApp users still could not tell the difference between end-to-end encrypted messages and regular messages.[134] 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.[35][135] 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.[136] According to a white paper that was released along with the announcement, WhatsApp messages are encrypted with the Signal Protocol.[137] WhatsApp calls are encrypted with SRTP, and all client-server communications are "layered within a separate encrypted channel".[137] The Signal Protocol library used by WhatsApp is open-source and published under the GPLv3 license.[137][138]
On February 24, 2017, (WhatsApp's 8th birthday), WhatsApp launched a new Status feature similar to Snapchat and Facebook stories.[80]
In May 2012 security researchers noticed that new updates of WhatsApp no longer sent messages as plaintext, but the cryptographic method implemented was subsequently described as "broken". In August 2012 the WhatsApp support staff said that messages were encrypted in the "latest version" of the WhatsApp software for iOS and Android (but not BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Symbian), without specifying the cryptographic method.
In August 2014, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app, with more than 600 million active users.[63] By early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users with over 30 billion messages being sent every day.[64] 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.[65] That month, WhatsApp had over 800 million active users.[66][67] By September 2015, the user base had grown to 900 million,[68] and by February 2016 it had grown to one billion.[69]
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.[8]
On January 13, 2013, Taghreedat launched a collaboration with WhatsApp to improve the localization of its applicants on various mobile devices. The project attracted over 2,600 Arab volunteers who joined the WhatsApp Translation Center to suggest variations and add votes to the Arabic strings localized at the Translation Center. The project was followed by a collaboration between Taghreedat and WhatsApp to carry out the translation and localization of WhatsApp on Windows Phone 8.
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,[92] but not at scale (e.g. in a contact center environment). However, in September 2017 WhatsApp announced what had long been rumored,[93][94] that they are building and testing new tools for businesses to use WhatsApp:[86]
a free WhatsApp Business app for small companies[95] 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[96] had provided unofficial solutions for enterprises to attend to large numbers of users, however these setups were shut down by WhatsApp.
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).[130]
In November 2014, WhatsApp introduced a feature named Read Receipts which alerts senders when their messages are read by recipients. Within a week, WhatsApp introduced an update allowing users to disable this feature so that message recipients do not send acknowledgements.
On December 1, 2014, Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar, both 17 years old, demonstrated the WhatsApp Message Handler Vulnerability, which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message of 2kb in size. To escape the problem, the user who receives the specially crafted message has to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh chat, because opening the message keeps on crashing WhatsApp unless the chat is deleted completely. In early 2015, after WhatsApp launched a web client that can be used from the browser, Bhuyan also found that it had two security issues that compromised user privacy: the WhatsApp Photo Privacy Bug and the WhatsApp Web Photo Sync Bug.
WhatsApp was founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton.WhatsApp joined Facebook in 2014, but continues to operate as a separate app with a laser focus on building a messaging service that works fast and reliably anywhere in the world.WhatsApp started as an alternative to SMS. Whatsapp now supports sending and receiving a variety of media including text, photos, videos, documents, and location, as well as voice calls. Whatsapp messages and calls are secured with end-to-end encryption, meaning that no third party including WhatsApp can read or listen to them. Whatsapp has a customer base of 1 billion people in over 180 countries. It is used to send personalised promotional messages to individual customers. It has plenty of advantages over SMS that includes ability to track how Message Broadcast Performs using blue tick option in Whatsapp. It allows sending messages to Do Not Disturb(DND) customers. Whatsapp is also used to send a series of bulk messages to their targeted customers using broadcast option. Companies started using this to a large extent because it is a cost effective promotional option and quick to spread a message. Still, Whatsapp doesn't allow businesses to place ads in their app.
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.[45][46] By February 2018, WhatsApp had a user base of over one and a half billion,[47][48] making it the most popular messaging application at the time.[48][49] WhatsApp has grown in multiple countries, including Brazil, India, and large parts of Europe, including the United Kingdom and France.[48]
It has been asserted that WhatsApp is plagued by scams invites hackers to spread malicious viruses or malware.[155][156] 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.[157] 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[158]