Timeline of WhatsApp
The following is a timeline of WhatsApp, a proprietary cross-platform, encrypted, instant messaging client for smartphones.
| Year | Month and date | Event type | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | February 24 | Company | Jan Koum incorporates WhatsApp in USA. |
| 2009 | August | Product | WhatsApp 2.0 is released on the App Store for the iPhone. |
| 2009 | October | Funding | Brian Acton persuades five ex-Yahoo! friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and is granted co-founder status. |
| 2009 | December | Product | WhatsApp for the iPhone is updated to send photos. |
| 2010 | August | Product | WhatsApp support for Android OS is added. |
| 2011 | January 21 | Competition | WeChat, a messenger app, is founded. It eventually becomes very popular in China. |
| 2011 | April | Funding | In Series A round, WhatsApp Statis founders agree to take $8 million from Sequoia Capital on top of their $250,000 seed funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner Jim Goetz. |
| 2012 | January 6 | Security | An unknown hacker publishes a website that makes it possible to change the status of an arbitrary WhatsApp user, as long as the phone number was known. |
| 2012 | August | Security | The WhatsApp support staff announce 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. |
| 2013 | February | Userbase | WhatsApp's user base swells to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50. |
| 2013 | July | Funding | Sequoia invests another $50 million in Series B round, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion. |
| 2013 | July 16 | Product | WhatsApp goes free, with an annual subscription fee of $1 after the first year. |
| 2013 | August | Competition | Telegram, a cloud-based instant messaging service, launches. |
| 2013 | August | Product | WhatsApp introduces voice messaging. |
| 2014 | February 19 | Company | Facebook, Inc. announces its acquisition of WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. Facebook pays $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders. |
| 2014 | March | Security | Someone discovers a vulnerability in WhatsApp encryption on the Android application that allows another app to access and read all of a user's chat conversations within it. |
| 2014 | November | Product | WhatsApp introduces a feature named Read Receipts, which alerts senders when their messages are read by recipients. Within a week, WhatsApp introduces an update allowing users to disable this feature so that message recipients do not send acknowledgements. |
| 2015 | January 21 | Product | WhatsApp launches WhatsApp Web, a web client which can be used through a web browser by syncing with the mobile device's connection. |
| 2015 | January 21 | Product | WhatsApp announces its policy on cracking down on 3rd-party clients, including WhatsApp+. Users would not be able to use WhatsApp's services at all until the third-party apps are uninstalled. |
| 2015 | March | Product | Voice calls between two accounts are added. |
| 2015 | December | Legal | WhatsApp is briefly shut down in Brazil after it refuses to place wiretaps on certain WhatsApp accounts. It is shut down in Brazil again in May 2016 and in July 2016. |
| 2016 | January 18 | Product | Jan Koum announces that WhatsApp will no longer charge its users a $1 annual subscription fee. There is still no clear plan for monetizing WhatsApp. |
| 2016 | March | Legal | Diego Dzodan, a Facebook executive, is arrested by Brazilian federal police after Facebook fails to turn over information from his WhatsApp messaging account into a judge's request for a drug trafficking investigation. |
| 2016 | March 2 | Product | WhatsApp introduces its document-sharing feature, initially allowing users to share PDF files with their contacts. |
| 2016 | April 5 | Product, Security | WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announce that they finish adding end-to-end encryption to "every form of communication" on WhatsApp, and that users could now verify each other's keys. |
| 2016 | May 10 | Product | WhatsApp is introduced for both Windows and Mac operating systems. |
| 2016 | November | Product | Video calls between two accounts are added. |
| 2017 | September 5 | Product | WhatsApp starts external testing of an enterprise platform which enables companies to provide customer service to users at scale. Airline KLM launches such a service. |
| 2018 | July | Product | Group voice and video calls for up to four accounts and labelling for forwarded messages are added |
| 2019 | January | Product | Limit on the forwarding of a message is lowered to five times |
| 2020 | April | Product | Group calls can be up to 8 accounts and 'highly forwarded' messages can be forwarded only to a single person |
| 2021 | August | Product | WhatsApp announces that users will be able to send photos and videos that will disappear after one view. |
| 2022 | May | Product | WhatsApp adds the ability to react to messages with six preset emoji (thumbs up, heart, joined hands, tears of laughter, mouth open in surprise, crying face). Share file limit is increased from 100MB to 2GB, and the default maximum size of group chats is increased from 256 to 512. |
| 2022 | July | Product | WhatsApp adds the ability to react to messages with any emoji. |
| 2023 | May | Product | WhatsApp announces users will be able to edit messages up to 15 minutes after being sent. |
| 2023 | June | Product | WhatsApp announces Channels, a feature that allows one-to-many communication for updates, and no defined limit for number of followers. Channels are not end-to-end encrypted, unlike messages in groups or chats. |
| 2023 | August | Product | WhatsApp relaunches its app for Apple computers, adding audio and video group calling. |
| 2023 | September | Product | WhatsApp adds the ability for users to share photos and videos in high-definition. |
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