More info
- Creator
- Jan Koum, Brian Acton
- Released
- Owner
- Meta
- Type
- Messaging app
- Website
- whatsapp.com
- Wikipedia
- en.wikipedia.org
The world's most-used messaging app — started in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton (Yahoo! veterans), bought by Facebook in 2014 for USD 19 billion. ~3 billion monthly users.
End-to-end encrypted since 2016 via the Signal Protocol (Acton later donated USD 50 million to the Signal Foundation after a row with Meta about monetisation). Backend written in Erlang — famously, 50 engineers ran 900 million users in 2014.
Dominant in Europe, Latin America, India, Africa, the Middle East. The US is the exception — SMS/iMessage rule there. WhatsApp Business is a central channel for small businesses globally.