Timeline of WhatsApp

The following is a timeline of WhatsApp, a proprietary cross-platform, encrypted, instant messaging client for smartphones.^[1]

Date	Event type	Details
February 2009	Company	Jan Koum incorporates WhatsApp in USA.[2]
August 2009	Product	WhatsApp 2.0 is released on the App Store for the iPhone.[3]
October 2009	Funding	Brian Acton persuades five ex-Yahoo! friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and is granted co-founder status.[2]
December 2009	Product	WhatsApp for the iPhone is updated to send photos.[2]
August 2010	Product	WhatsApp support for Android OS is added.[4]
January 21 2011	Competition	WeChat, a messenger app, is founded.[5] It eventually becomes very popular in China.
April 2011	Funding	In Series A round, WhatsApp 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.[2]
January 2012	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.[6][7]
August 2012	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.[8]
February 2013	Userbase	WhatsApp's user base swells to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50.[2]
July 2013	Funding	Sequoia invests another $50 million in Series B round, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion.[9]
	Product	WhatsApp goes free, with an annual subscription fee of $1 after the first year.[10][11]
August 2013	Competition	Telegram, a cloud-based instant messaging service, launches.[12]
	Product	WhatsApp introduces voice messaging.[13]
February 2014	Company	Facebook, Inc. announces its acquisition of WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.[14] 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.[15]
March 2014	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.[16]
November 2014	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.[17]
January 2015	Product	WhatsApp launches WhatsApp Web, a web client which can be used through a web browser by syncing with the mobile device's connection.[18]
	Product	WhatsApp announces its policy on cracking down on 3rd-party clients, including WhatsApp+.[19] Users would not be able to use WhatsApp's services at all until the third-party apps are uninstalled.[20]
March 2015	Product	Voice calls between two accounts are added.[21]
December 2015	Legal	WhatsApp is briefly shut down in Brazil after it refuses to place wiretaps on certain WhatsApp accounts.[22] It is shut down in Brazil again in May 2016 and in July 2016.[23]
January 2016	Product	Jan Koum announces that WhatsApp will no longer charge its users a $1 annual subscription fee.[24][25] There is still no clear plan for monetizing WhatsApp.[26]
March 2016	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.[27]
	Product	WhatsApp introduces its document-sharing feature, initially allowing users to share PDF files with their contacts.[28]
April 2016	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.[29][30][31]
May 2016	Product	WhatsApp is introduced for both Windows and Mac operating systems.[32]
November 2016	Product	Video calls between two accounts are added.[33]
September 2017	Product	WhatsApp starts external testing of an enterprise platform which enables companies to provide customer service to users at scale.[34] Airline KLM launches such a service.[35]
July 2018	Product	Group voice and video calls for up to four accounts[36] and labelling for forwarded messages are added[37]
April 2019	Product	WhatsApp announces a new privacy setting to allow users to control who can add them to groups. They can decide if they want everyone to add them to groups or just their contacts, and they can even choose to exclude specific contacts from adding them to groups. The feature was released in November 2019.[38]
	Product	Limit on the forwarding of a message is lowered to five times[39]
April 2020	Product	Group calls can be up to 8 accounts[40] and 'highly forwarded' messages can be forwarded only to a single person[41]
August 2021	Product	WhatsApp announces that users will be able to send photos and videos that will disappear after one view.[42]
May 2022	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.[43]
July 2022	Product	WhatsApp adds the ability to react to messages with any emoji.[44]
May 2023	Product	WhatsApp announces users will be able to edit messages up to 15 minutes after being sent.[45]
June 2023	Product	WhatsApp announces Channels, a feature that allows one-to-many communication for updates, with no limit for number of followers. Channels are not end-to-end encrypted, unlike messages in groups or chats. [46][47]
August 2023	Product	WhatsApp relaunches its app for Apple computers, adding audio and video group calling.[48]
September 2023	Product	WhatsApp adds the ability for users to share photos and videos in high-definition.[49]
December 2024	Product	WhatsApp replaces its 'Typing...' indicator with a new visual ellipsis cue that shows the typer's profile picture[50][51]