In December 2023, WhatsApp’s “View Once” feature expanded to include voice messages. In August 2022, WhatsApp launched an integration with JioMart, available only to users in India. In April 2018, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum announced he would be leaving the company. To start using WhatsApp Desktop, you first must log in with your WhatsApp user account. All you have to do is Lucky Friends casino use the WhatsApp app on your smartphone and scan the QR code on the PC screen.
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- Now, the feature is also made available to iOS users, allowing them to link up to four iPhones.
- It allows users to send text messages, voice messages, and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content.
- One of the most important parts of WhatsApp Desktop is that, as mentioned above, it offers the same features as the mobile version but on PC.
- WhatsApp also introduced chat filters, allowing users to sort their chats by All, Unread or Groups.
- WhatsApp Desktop is the official WhatsApp client for Windows that lets you use this popular instant messaging tool from the comfort of your desktop.
- On May 9, 2014, the government of Iran announced that it had proposed to block the access to WhatsApp service to Iranian residents.
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Supports
Unlike messages in groups or private chats, channels are not end-to-end encrypted. In October 2023 they also introduced passkey support, where a user can verify their login with on-device biometrics, rather than SMS. In November 2023, WhatsApp also began rolling out support for sending login codes to a linked email address, rather than via SMS. Voice calls between two accounts were added to the app in March and April 2015. In September 2017, WhatsApp’s co-founder Brian Acton left the company to start a nonprofit group, later revealed as the Signal Foundation, which developed the WhatsApp competitor Signal.
Security and encryption
According to the Financial Times, WhatsApp “has done to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling on landlines”. The messages involved discussing how to make an explosive device and a confession to the attack. In September 2019, WhatsApp was criticized for its implementation of a ‘delete for everyone’ feature. When a user deletes media for everyone, WhatsApp does not delete images saved in the iOS camera roll and so those users are able to keep the images.
Alternatives to WhatsApp Desktop
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- 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.
- WhatsApp has been officially supported for iPads and its iPadOS since May 27, 2025.
- On May 18, 2017, the European Commission announced that it was fining Facebook €110 million for “providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover” in 2014.
- The idea started off as an app that would display statuses in a phone’s Contacts menu, showing if a person was at work or on a call.
- In December 2023, WhatsApp’s “View Once” feature expanded to include voice messages.
- 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.
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In 2016, WhatsApp was widely praised for the addition of end-to-end encryption and earned a 6 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Secure Messaging Scorecard”. WhatsApp Payments (marketed as WhatsApp Pay) is a peer-to-peer money transfer feature. WhatsApp has been officially supported for iPads and its iPadOS since May 27, 2025. In July 2025, WhatsApp stopped developing the Windows UWP-based app due to poor support and deprecation of the UWP framework by Microsoft. In 2023, WhatsApp replaced the Electron-based apps with native versions for their respective platforms.
In October 2020, WhatsApp rolled out a feature allowing users to mute both individuals and group chats forever. According to the company, messages could be edited within a 15-minute window after being sent. Edited messages were tagged as “edited” to inform recipients that the content had been modified. On February 24, 2017, WhatsApp launched a new Status feature similar to Snapchat and Facebook stories. The Cloud API enables businesses to integrate WhatsApp with other software, have a central WhatsApp account for multiple users and implement advanced automation. 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.
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- However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job.
- Since the complete roll out of this feature, users cannot check old messages before this period on the Web version anymore.
- Higher usage was reported by frontline clinical staff to keep up with care needs, even though NHS trust policies do not permit their use.
- WhatsApp was announced to be the 3rd most downloaded mobile phone app of the decade 2010–2019.
- Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.
- In October 2023 they also introduced passkey support, where a user can verify their login with on-device biometrics, rather than SMS.
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Both Telegram and Signal in particular were reported to get registration spikes during WhatsApp outages and controversies. Since the complete roll out of this feature, users cannot check old messages before this period on the Web version anymore. In January 2021, WhatsApp announced a controversial new privacy policy allowing WhatsApp to share data with its parent company, Facebook.
Features
Koum then hired a friend in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop a BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later. However, when early versions of WhatsApp kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job. A month earlier, after Koum purchased an iPhone, he and Acton decided to create an app for the App Store. The idea started off as an app that would display statuses in a phone’s Contacts menu, showing if a person was at work or on a call.
Sending and receiving WhatsApp messages from your PC
At that point WhatsApp was adding about 25 million new users every month, or 833,000 active users per day. The organization reported a massive drop-off in traffic for the blocked services, though the country’s government made no official statements about the block. In May 2019, WhatsApp was attacked by hackers who installed spyware on a number of victims’ smartphones. 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 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.
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Work from Home Apps
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The app collected data on who the users contacted and how often, and when and how they were using the app. 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. Previously, users could opt-out of such data sharing, but the new policy removed this option. The new privacy policy would not apply within the EU, as it is illegal under the GDPR. 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 February 2015, WhatsApp implemented voice calling, which helped WhatsApp to attract a different segment of the user population.
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On May 18, 2017, the European Commission announced that it was fining Facebook €110 million for “providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover” in 2014. 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”. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to pay for more services like this – or so the hope goes. By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. The service was created by WhatsApp Inc. of Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion. 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.