The following is a timeline of WhatsApp, a proprietary cross-platform, encrypted, instant

messaging client for smartphones.[1]

Full timeline[edit]
Month Event
Year Details
and date type

2009 February 4 Company Jan Koum incorporates WhatsApp in California.[2]

Brian Acton persuades five ex-Yahoo! friends to invest

2009 October Funding $250,000 in seed funding, and is granted co-founder
status.[2]

2009 August Product WhatsApp 2.0 is released on the App Store for the iPhone.[3]

2009 December Product WhatsApp for the iPhone is updated to send photos.[2]

2010 August Product WhatsApp support for Android OS is added.[4]

WeChat, a messenger app, is founded.[5] It eventually

2011 January 21 Competition
becomes very popular in China.

In Series A round, WhatsApp founders agree to take $7

million from Sequoia Capital on top of their $250,000 seed
2011 April Funding
funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner
Jim Goetz.[2]

2011 May Competition SnapChat, a competing photo messaging app, is founded.[6]

An unknown hacker publishes a website that makes it

2012 January 6 Security possible to change the status of an arbitrary WhatsApp
user, as long as the phone number was known.[7][8]
 Month Event
Year Details
and date type

The WhatsApp support staff announce that messages were

encrypted in the "latest version" of the WhatsApp software
2012 August Security for iOS and Android (but not BlackBerry, Windows Phone,
and Symbian), without specifying the cryptographic
method.[9]

WhatsApp's user base swells to about 200 million active

2013 February Userbase
users and its staff to 50.[2]

Sequoia invests another $50 million in Series B round,

2013 July Funding
valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion.[10]

WhatsApp goes free, with an annual subscription fee of $1

2013 July 16 Product
after the first year.[11][12]

Telegram, a cloud-based instant messaging service,

2013 August Competition
launches.[13]

2013 August Product WhatsApp introduces voice messaging.[14]

Facebook announces its acquisition of WhatsApp for US$19

billion, its largest acquisition to date.[15] Facebook pays $4
February
2014 Company billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and an
19
additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to
WhatsApp's founders.[16]

Someone discovers a vulnerability in WhatsApp encryption

2014 March Security on the Android application that allows another app to access
and read all of a users chat conversations within it.[17]

WhatsApp introduces a feature named Read Receipts,

2014 November Product
which alerts senders when their messages are read by
recipients. Within a week, WhatsApp introduces an update
 Month Event
Year Details
and date type

allowing users to disable this feature so that message

recipients do not send acknowledgements.[18]

WhatsApp launches WhatsApp Web, a web client which can

2015 January 21 Product be used through a web browser by syncing with the mobile
device's connection.[19]

WhatsApp announces its policy on cracking down on 3rd-

party clients, including WhatsApp+.[20] Users would not be
2015 January 21 Product
able to use WhatsApps services at all until the third-party
apps are uninstalled.[21]

WhatsApp is briefly shut down in Brazil after it refuses to

2015 December Legal place wiretaps on certain WhatsApp accounts.[22] It is shut
down in Brazil again on May 2016 and in July 2016.[23]

Jan Koum announces that WhatsApp will no longer charge

2016 January 18 Product its users a $1 annual subscription fee.[24][25] There is still no
clear plan for monetizing WhatsApp.[26]

Diego Dzodan, a Facebook executive, is arrested by

Brazilian federal police after Facebook fails to turn over
2016 March Legal
information from his WhatsApp messaging account into a
judge's request for a drug trafficking investigation.[27]

WhatsApp introduces its document-sharing feature, initially

2016 March 2 Product
allowing users to share PDF files with their contacts.[28]

WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announce that they

Product, finish adding end-to-end encryption [29] to "every form of
2016 April 5
Security communication" on WhatsApp, and that users could now
verify each other's keys.[30][31][32]
 Month Event
Year Details
and date type

WhatsApp is introduced for

2016 May 10 Product
both Windows and Mac operating systems.[33]

WhatsApp started external testing of an enterprise platform

September
2017 Product which enables companies to provide customer service to
5
users at scale.[34] Airline