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 use the WhatsApp app on your smartphone and scan the QR code on the PC screen.
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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 Lucky Friends casino 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.
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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.
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.
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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.