WhatsApp Inc., 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 travelled to South America as a break from work.[14] At one point they applied for jobs at Facebook but were rejected.[14] 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 that the seven-month-old App Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps, he 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, so Fishman introduced Koum to Igor Solomennikov, a developer in Russia that he had found on RentACoder.com. Koum almost immediately chose the name "WhatsApp" because it sounded like "what's up", and a week later on his birthday, on February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, early WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck and 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".[14]
In June 2009, Apple launched push notifications, letting developers ping users when they were not using an app. Koum updated WhatsApp so that each time the user changed their statuses, it would ping everyone in the user's network.[14] WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the active users suddenly swelled to 250,000. Koum visited Acton, who was still unemployed while managing another unsuccessful startup and decided to join the company.[14] In October Acton persuaded five ex-Yahoo! friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a result was granted co-founder status and a stake. He officially joined on November 1.[14] After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired an old friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to make the BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later.[14]
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 WhatsApp for the iPhone was updated to send photos. By early 2011, WhatsApp was in the top 20 of all apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.[14]
In April 2011, the founders agreed to take $7 million from Sequoia Capital on top of their $250,000 seed funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.[14] According to Goetz, the venture capital firm originally discovered WhatsApp through an App store tracking system they developed called 'early bird', at a time when the app was much more popular in other countries than in the US. However, it took months for the VC firm to track down Koum and Acton, given that the company didn't have a publicly available address nor signage at the time. All Goetz knew was that they were located in Mountain View, and Sequoia partners "literally walked the streets of Mountain View to see if [they] could intersect with [Koum and Acton]."[15]
By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swollen to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50. Sequoia invested another $50 million, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion.[14]
In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the service each month.[16] As of April 22, 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million monthly active users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos are shared each day, and the messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages each day.[17] On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his Twitter account that WhatsApp had over 600 million active users worldwide. WhatsApp added about 25 million new users every month or 833,000 active users per day.[18][19] With 65 million active users, about 10% of the total worldwide users, India is the largest single country in terms of number of users.[20]
In January 2015, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app with more than 600 million active users.[18] In April 2015, WhatsApp reached 800 million active users.[21] By September 2015, the user base had grown to 900 million,[22] and by February 2016 it had grown to one billion.[10]
As of November 30, 2015, the Android client for WhatsApp started making links to another messenger called Telegram unclickable and uncopiable.[23][24][25] It has been confirmed by multiple sources that WhatsApp is actively blocking domains with the word telegram in the source code of the Android app.[25] WhatsApp has not yet given an explanation for this behavior.
Acquisition by Facebook[edit]
On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation,[26] Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.[13] Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders (advised by Morgan Stanley), Koum and Acton.[27] Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing.[13] The transaction was the largest purchase of a company backed by venture capitalists to date.[12] Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.[28][29]
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.[30] Line claimed to have seen 2 million new users for its service.[31]
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.[32][33] 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."[32]
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.[34][35]
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.[36]
By early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly active users with over 30 billion messages being sent every day.[37] 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.[38] That month, WhatsApp had over 800 million active users.[39]
On January 18th, 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.[40][41] 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.[42]
Platform support[edit]
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 40was added. A month later support for Windows Phone was added, followed by BlackBerry 10 in March 2013.[43] In April 2015, support for Samsung's Tizen OS was added.[44] An unofficial port has been released for the MeeGo-based Nokia N9 called Wazzap,[45] as well as a port for the Maemo-based Nokia N900 called Yappari.[46]
The oldest device capable of running WhatsApp is the Symbian-based Nokia N95 released in March 2007.
In August 2014, WhatsApp released an update to its Android app, adding support for Android Wear smartwatches.[47]
In 2014 an unofficial open source plug-in called whatsapp-purple was released for Pidgin, implementing its XMPP protocol and making it possible to use WhatsApp on a Windows or Linux PC.[48]
On January 21, 2015, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Web, a web client[49] 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 by the end of 2016.
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