WhatsApp is a 📝Meta product — a cross-platform messaging and voice-over-IP app providing end-to-end encrypted text, voice, video, and media communication across one-to-one and group chats.
Founded in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton — both former 📝Yahoo engineers — WhatsApp was acquired by 📝Facebook in 2014 for roughly nineteen billion dollars, one of the largest technology deals in history and a recurring reference in antitrust cases against Meta. The app reaches more than two billion users worldwide, making it Meta's primary global messenger alongside Messenger.
Used by individuals, families, and businesses worldwide — especially dominant outside the United States — for daily personal messaging, group coordination, and increasingly for customer support via the WhatsApp Business API and Communities for large-scale group chats.
Key Features
- End-to-end encryption — every message is encrypted by default using the Signal Protocol (added in 2016), though metadata about who messages whom and when remains visible to Meta.
- Group and Community chats — group chats up to a thousand members each, plus Communities for organizing many related groups under a single umbrella with announcement channels.
- Voice and video calls — one-to-one and group calls with both voice and video, encrypted end-to-end and routed over data rather than cellular carrier minutes anywhere in the world.
- Status updates — ephemeral twenty-four-hour photo, video, and text posts visible only to your contacts, mirroring the Stories pattern that originated on 📝Instagram and Facebook.
- Business messaging — the WhatsApp Business app and Business API let companies handle customer support, send transactional notifications, and run rich product catalogs in chat.
Getting Started
- Download WhatsApp from the App Store, Google Play, or whatsapp.com.
- Verify your phone number — WhatsApp uses it as your account identifier.
- Allow contact access to find friends and family already on the platform.
- Start a chat with a contact, or create a new group from the chats tab.
- For businesses: download WhatsApp Business or apply for API access via Meta.