Today we are announcing a partnership with Facebook that will allow us to continue on that simple mission. Doing this will give WhatsApp the flexibility to grow and expand, while giving me, Brian, and the rest of our team more time to focus on building a communications service that’s as fast, affordable and personal as possible.
Here’s what will change for you, our users: nothing.
WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can continue to enjoy the service for a nominal fee. You can continue to use WhatsApp no matter where in the world you are, or what smartphone you’re using. And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had to compromise on the core principles that will always define our company, our vision and our product.
On a personal note, Brian and I couldn’t be more proud to be part of a small team of people who, in just under five years, built a communication service that now supports over 450 million monthly active users worldwide and over 320 million daily active users. They have helped re-define and revolutionize communication for the 21st century, and we couldn’t be more grateful.
Our team has always believed that neither cost and distance should ever prevent people from connecting with their friends and loved ones, and won’t rest until everyone, everywhere is empowered with that opportunity. We want to thank all of our users and everybody in our lives for making this next chapter possible, and for joining us as we continue on this very special journey.
400 Million Stories
Today, we’re proud to announce that because of you, WhatsApp has reached a milestone that no other mobile messaging service has achieved: 400 million monthly active users, with 100 million active users added in the last four months alone. This isn’t a count of people who just registered for WhatsApp – it’s the number of people who are actively using the service every single month.
When we say that you made this possible, we mean it. WhatsApp has just 50 employees, and most of us are engineers. We’ve arrived at this point without spending a dollar on targeted ads or big marketing campaigns. We’re here because of all the people who share their WhatsApp stories with co-workers, friends, and loved ones – stories we love to hear.
There was the woman from New Zealand who moved to South Africa to complete her PhD. The week before she left to go back home, she met the man of her dreams. Despite living thousands of miles apart, she told us that WhatsApp has allowed them to feel closer than ever.
We also heard from a British woman who runs a charity in Uganda. She told us that her team on the ground uses WhatsApp to send daily reports, photos, and videos of the children they’re helping, which she shares to build support for her organization all over the world.
Doctors in India are using WhatsApp to instantly send electrocardiogram pictures of patients who’ve suffered heart attacks, saving valuable time and potentially lives. In the mountains of Madrid, rescuers used WhatsApp to locate and save lost hikers. And today, as I follow the unfolding political crisis in Ukraine, the place where I was born and lived until the age of sixteen, I can’t help but hope that the next great WhatsApp story will be about people using the service to speak their mind and stand up for their basic rights.
Our goal in creating WhatsApp was to empower people through technology and communication, no matter who they are, or where they live. We wanted to improve people’s lives in some small way. So thank you for making that possible. Thank you for sharing your stories, and please, keep them coming – we can’t wait to hear what you’ll use WhatsApp for next.
Introducing Voice Messages
We are releasing Voice Messages on all of our platforms simultaneously. We worked very hard to make sure that iPhone and Android devices have perfectly working Voice Messages functionality, and we put extra effort into making sure that BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone users can enjoy the same rich and powerful Voice Messaging experience.
To learn more about Voice Message and how it works, take a look at this video we made:
You can also read our FAQ entry if you want to learn more about Voice Messages for your specific phone:
http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/link/voice_messaging.php
We hope you will enjoy Voice Messages as much as we enjoyed building it.
iPhone v2.10.1 release notes
First, we are updating our business model for new iPhone users going forward. As you know, we used to charge iPhone users a $.99 one time payment, while Android and other platforms had free service for the first year and paid $0.99 a year after that. From now on, we’ve simplified our business model so that all users on all platforms will enjoy their first year of WhatsApp service for free, and only pay $.99 per year after that. We feel that this model will allow us to become the communications service of the 21st century, and provide you the best way to stay in touch with your friends and family with no ads getting in the way. The good news for all current iPhone users is that WhatsApp will be free of charge for the rest of your life.
Second, we’ve added an option to backup your message history to iCloud. We spent the last six months working to make iCloud backup as simple and user friendly as possible. On your iPhone, go into ‘WhatsApp Settings > Chat Settings > Chat Backup’ if you want to back up your conversation history. When you reinstall the app, you will be prompted to restore from iCloud during the initialization process.
Third, since we’re engineers at heart, we’ve introduced developer hooks into WhatsApp. We’ve had many other iOS developers ask us for API hooks to make interfacing with WhatsApp easy. Now you can do that. Learn more at http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/iphone/23559013
That’s all folks. We hope you will enjoy this new release.
Life’s Change Agent and the iPhone 3G
The iPhone 3G has a special place for me in my heart – it was the first smartphone I bought in January of 2009 and it was the first phone on which we started developing WhatsApp just a month later.
Then as now, however, we must follow Apple’s lead on all things related to the iPhone. Their pace of innovation has a price of forced obsolescence.
Por qué no vendemos publicidad
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes,
working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.
– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
– Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Brian y yo llevamos conjuntamente más de 20 años trabajando en Yahoo!, trabajando para que el sitio funcionara bien. Estábamos vendiendo anuncios, que era el negocio de Yahoo!. Yahoo! recolectaba datos, apoyaba sitios web y vendía anuncios.
Estuvimos en Yahoo! mientras Google nos superó en ambos tamaño y poder… era un vendedor de anuncios más eficiente y lucrativo. La gente de Google sabía lo que buscaba, por lo tanto colectaba tus datos con más eficiencia para vender mejores anuncios.
Hoy en día estas compañías saben todo lo que hay de saber acerca de ti, tus amigos, tus intereses, y lo usan todo para vender anuncios.
Tres años atrás cuando empezamos nuestro propio negocio, quisimos crear un servicio que no fuera sólo otro repositorio para anuncios. Queríamos crear un servicio que la gente quisiera usar porque les ahorraría dinero y mejoraría sus vidas en alguna manera. Sabíamos que podríamos cobrar gente directamente si lográbamos todo eso. Sabíamos que podríamos hacer lo que todo el mundo intenta hacer cada día: evitar anuncios. Nadie quiere ver más anuncios.
Sabemos que la gente pasa el día, del momento que despiertan al momento que acuestan, chateando con sus amigos. Los anuncios no tienen ninguna importancia cuando simplemente quieres hablar con alguien.
La publicidad no sólo va en contra al estético de una aplicación, sino que es un insulto a tu inteligencia y una interrupción a tus pensamientos. En cada empresa que vende anuncios, un gran número de los ingenieros pasan sus días ajustando la búsqueda de datos, escribiendo código informático para colectar tus datos personales, actualizando los servidores donde se almacenan los datos, y asegurándose que todo está registrado y recopilado y cortado y empacado y enviado… para que el producto final sea un anuncio que es un poco más personalizado en tu navegador o pantalla móvil.
Tienes que acordarte de que en el negocio de anuncios, tú, el usuario, eres el producto. En WhatsApp, nuestros ingenieros pasan su tiempo corrigiendo errores, añadiendo nuevas funciones y arreglando complejidades para producir un mensajero vibrante, asequible y confiable para todos los teléfonos móviles en el mundo. Eso es nuestro producto y nuestra pasión. Tus datos privados ni nos importan.
Cuando gente nos pregunta por qué cobramos para WhatsApp, les respondemos: “¿Has contemplado el alternativo?”
Sending Places and Group Icons
Send place
Once you enter “Share Location” menu, you will be presented with an option to send your Current Location immediately as you have always been able to in the past. Alternatively, if you wait a few seconds, you will be presented with a list of places nearby. Once you select the place to send, it will appear in the conversation. You can tap on the name of the place to get more information about it or you can tap on the map thumbnail to view the place on the map. This is what selecting places and viewing places looks like on the iPhone:
This is what selecting places and viewing places looks like on the Android:
This is what selecting places and viewing places looks like on the BlackBerry:
Group Icon
Anybody can set or change the group icon when viewing Group Info. This is how you get into the Group Info:
Once you enter Group Info, simply tap or click on the Group Icon to set it or change it:
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more cool and innovative features as we continue to iterate and improve our product.
It is a hoax. Really, it is.
WhatsApp is going to cost us money soon. The only way that it will stay free is if you are a frequent user i.e. you have at least 10 people you are chatting with. To become a frequent user send this message to 10 people who receive it (2 ticks) and your WhatsApp logo should turn Red to indicate a frequent user.
Please understand that this is a hoax and there is no truth to it. While we are flattered that we made it to Hoax Slayer, we would rather work on cool new features instead of debunking silly stories like these.
UPDATE: this is a hoax message as well:
“Whatsapp is shutting down on 28th jan Message from Jim Balsamic (CEO of Whatsapp) we have had an over usage of user names on whatsapp Messenger. We are requesting all users to forward this message to their entire contact list. If you do not forward this message, we will take it as your account is invalid and it will be deleted within the next 48 hours. Please DO NOT ignore this message or whatsapp will no longer recognise your activation. If you wish to re-activate your account after it has been deleted, a charge of 25.00 will be added to your monthly bill. We are also aware of the issue involving the pictures updates not showing. We are working diligently at fixing this problem and it will be up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation from the Whatsapp team”
1 million is so 2011
Happy 2012 everyone!
A few months ago we published a blog post that talked about our servers doing 1 million tcp connections on a single box: http://blog.whatsapp.com/?p=170
Today we have an update for those keeping score at home: we are now able to easily push our systems to over 2 million tcp connections!
jkb@c123$ sysctl
kern.ipc.numopensockets
kern.ipc.numopensockets: 2277845Best part is that we are able to do it with plenty of CPU and memory to spare and do it sustainably:
CPU: 37.9% user, 0.0% nice, 13.6% system, 6.6% interrupt, 41.9%
idle
Mem: 35G Active, 14G Inact, 18G Wired, 4K Cache, 9838M Buf, 27G
FreeThis time we also wanted to share some more technical details with you about hardware, OS and software:
hw.machine: amd64
hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5675 @
3.07GHz
hw.ncpu: 24
hw.physmem: 103062118400
hw.usermem:
100556451840
jkb@c123$ uname -rps
FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE amd64
jkb@c123$ cat
/boot/loader.conf.local
boot_verbose=""
kern.hwpmc.nbuffers=32
kern.hwpmc.nsamples=64
kern.ipc.maxsockets=2400000
kern.maxfiles=3000000
kern.maxfilesperproc=2700000
kern.maxproc=16384
kern.timecounter.smp_tsc=1
net.inet.tcp.tcbhashsize=524288
net.inet.tcp.hostcache.hashsize=4096
net.inet.tcp.hostcache.cachelimit=131072
net.inet.tcp.hostcache.bucketlimit=120and the last important piece of our infrastracture is Erlang:
8> erlang:system_info(system_version).
"Erlang R14B03
(erts-5.8.4) [source] [64-bit] [smp:24:24] [rq:24] [async-threads:0]
[kernel-poll:false]\n"P.S. – we are hiring in both client and server teams, so send your resume to jobs at whatsapp dot com if you are interested (.. and we are also looking for summer interns)
one billion messages
Coinciding with our planet crossing the 7 billion population mark this week, last week WhatsApp crossed its own milestone for the first time by sending just over 1 billion messages in a single day. Similar to the awe we feel that our planet will now hold over 7 billion people, all of us at WhatsApp are extremely humbled and excited about the future.
Just how much is 1 billion messages? That is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second.
1 billion messages a day is a significant milestone and also a small step closer towards our goal: providing a great mobile messaging system for a global market, regardless of your handset.
The loyalty and passion consumers have for our product leaves us feeling great gratitude, we really couldn’t do it without you.
