Whatsapp is celebrating its tenth birthday. It has come a long way and has had its fair share of highs and lows. On February 24, 2009, two former employees of Yahoo, Jan Koum and Brian Acton started Whatsapp who wouldn’t have thought it would turn out to become the world’s most popular chat app. However, this $19 billion messaging platform has faced downfalls especially after being formally acquired by Facebook in 2014. While the users of Whatsapp never stopped criticizing its features and have always wanted more, Whatsapp successfully found its place and has over a billion active users today.
Today, one out of seven people in this world uses Whatsapp every day. Whatsapp is available on both Android and iOS platforms which is one of the reasons for its success. Even though Messenger holds a prominent place amongst other chat apps, Whatsapp is the first app that crosses anybody’s mind when they wish to share anything and everything under the sun. It has become part and parcel of one’s life. No wonder Whatsapp is the user’s first choice as it provides a simple and user-friendly platform. From sharing last night’s party pics to building businesses, Whatsapp has managed to hold its place in the crowd.
Through one of the blog posts, Whatsapp said, “It’s been 10 years since we started WhatsApp! Over the past decade, we’ve heard from people across the globe who are using WhatsApp to stay in touch with their loved ones, connect with their communities, and build businesses. These stories continue to inspire us and to celebrate this milestone, we’re looking back at some of our biggest moments over the years.”
Over the years Whatsapp has added new features to meet the user’s expectations. Some of its current features are voice calls, Whatsapp status, voice messages, contact and location sharing, remove the sent messages, group chats and many more. Whatsapp has become the one-stop solution for anything and everything as we are living in the data-driven world. As the amount of data generated every day is large, the future of the messaging platform looks brighter.
Even though Whatsapp features are intriguing, they have caused some troubles too. The amount of fake news that is shared has increased in the last two years. For the very same reason, Whatsapp reduced the message forwarding limit on the app. Whatsapp also added end-to-end message encryption to increase security. Even after that many criticisms, Whatsapp still holds a prominent place in the market. Well, the positives and negatives always come together, don’t they? Cheers to Whatsapp.
