Timeline of WhatsApp

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

Year	Month and date	Event type	Details
2009	February 24	Company	Jan Koum incorporates WhatsApp in USA.[2]
2009	August	Product	WhatsApp 2.0 is released on the App Store for the iPhone.[3]
2009	October	Funding	Brian Acton persuades five ex-Yahoo! friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and is granted co-founder status.[2]
2009	December	Product	WhatsApp for the iPhone is updated to send photos.[2]
2010	August	Product	WhatsApp support for Android OS is added.[4]
2011	January 21	Competition	WeChat, a messenger app, is founded.[5] It eventually becomes very popular in China.
2011	April	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]
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.[6][7]
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.[8]
2013	February	Userbase	WhatsApp's user base swells to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50.[2]
2013	July	Funding	Sequoia invests another $50 million in Series B round, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion.[9]
2013	July 16	Product	WhatsApp goes free, with an annual subscription fee of $1 after the first year.[10][11]
2013	August	Competition	Telegram, a cloud-based instant messaging service, launches.[12]
2013	August	Product	WhatsApp introduces voice messaging.[13]
2014	February 19	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]
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.[16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
2015	January 21	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]
2015	March	Product	Voice calls between two accounts are added.[21]
2015	December	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]
2016	January 18	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]
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.[27]
2016	March 2	Product	WhatsApp introduces its document-sharing feature, initially allowing users to share PDF files with their contacts.[28]
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.[29][30][31]
2016	May 10	Product	WhatsApp is introduced for both Windows and Mac operating systems.[32]
2016	November	Product	Video calls between two accounts are added.[33]
2017	September 5	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]
2018	July	Product	Group voice and video calls for up to four accounts[36] and labelling for forwarded messages are added[37]
2019	January	Product	Limit on the forwarding of a message is lowered to five times[38]
2020	April	Product	Group calls can be up to 8 accounts[39] and 'highly forwarded' messages can be forwarded only to a single person[40]
2021	August	Product	WhatsApp announces that users will be able to send photos and videos that will disappear after one view.[41]
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.[42]
2022	July	Product	WhatsApp adds the ability to react to messages with any emoji.[43]
2023	May	Product	WhatsApp announces users will be able to edit messages up to 15 minutes after being sent.[44]
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. [45][46]
2023	August	Product	WhatsApp relaunches its app for Apple computers, adding audio and video group calling.[47]
2023	September	Product	WhatsApp adds the ability for users to share photos and videos in high-definition.[48]
2024	December	Product	WhatsApp replaces its 'Typing...' indicator with a new visual ellipsis cue that shows the typer's profile picture[49][50]