WhatsAppball

WhatsAppball is a Messaging app ball created sometime on January 2009. He is owned by Metaball. He runs mainly on mobile phones, but also can be run on Mac and Pc. He is the most popular communicating app on some parts of the globe.

2009–2014
WhatsApp was founded by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo!.

Initially, WhatsApp was not intended to be a messaging app.

In January 2009, after Koum purchased an iPhone, he and Acton, keen to jump into what they saw foresaw as a newly burgeoning multi-million dollar app industry created by Apple App Storeball, Koum came up with an idea for an app to provide dynamic information about the people listed in your address book: it would show statuses for each person, for example: "if you were on a call, your battery was low, or you were at the gym." Their discussions often took place at the home of Koum's Russian friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose. They realized that to take the idea further, they would need an iPhone developer. Fishman visited RentACoder.com, found Russian developer Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum.

Koum named the app WhatsApp to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, when early versions of WhatsAppball kept crashing, Koum considered giving up and looking for a new job. Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".

It wasn't until four to five months after the app had been downloaded by only a handful of Fishman's Russian speaking friends, that Appleball launched push notifications in June 2009, allowing users to be pinged when they were not using an app.

WhatsApp 2.0 was released in August 2009 with a purposely designed messaging component and the number of active users suddenly increased to 250,000.

Although Acton was working on another startup idea, he decided to join the company. In October 2009, Acton persuaded five former friends at Yahoo! to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and Acton became a co-founder and was given a stake. He officially joined WhatsApp on November 1. After months at beta stage, the application launched in November 2009, exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. Koum then hired a friend in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to develop a BlackBerry version, which arrived two months later. Subsequently, WhatsApp for Symbian OS was added in May 2010, and for Android OS in August 2010. In 2010, WhatsApp was subject to multiple acquisition offers from Google which were all declined.

To cover the cost of sending verification texts to users, WhatsApp was changed from a free service to a paid one. In December 2009, the ability to send photos was added to the iOS version. By early 2011, WhatsApp was one of the top 20 apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.

In April 2011, Sequoia Capital invested about $8 million for more than 15% of the company, after months of negotiation by Sequoia partner Jim Goetz.

By February 2013, WhatsApp had about 200 million active users and 50 staff members. Sequoia invested another $50 million, and WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion. Sometime in 2013, WhatsApp acquired Santa Clara based startup, SkyMobius, the developers of Vtok, a video and voice calling app.

In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users used the service each month.

Facebook subsidiary (since 2014)
On February 19, 2014, just one year after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms) announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion, its largest acquisition to date. At the time, it was the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history. Sequoia Capital received an approximate 5000% return on its initial investment. Facebook, which was advised by Allen & Co, paid $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and (advised by Morgan Stanley) an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units granted to WhatsApp's founders Koum and Acton. Employee stock was scheduled to vest over four years subsequent to closing. Days after the announcement, WhatsApp users experienced a loss of service, leading to anger across social media.

The acquisition was influenced by the data provided by Onavo, Facebook's research app for monitoring competitors and trending usage of social activities on mobile phones, as well as startups that are performing "unusually well".

The acquisition caused a considerable number of users to try and/or move to other message services. Telegram claimed that it acquired 8 million new users; and Line, 2 million.

At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.org vision. A TechCrunch article said this about Zuckerberg's vision:"The idea, he said, is to develop a group of basic internet services that would be free of charge to use – 'a 911 for the internet.' These could be a social networking service like Facebook, a messaging service, maybe search and other things like weather. Providing a bundle of these free of charge to users will work like a gateway drug of sorts – users who may be able to afford data services and phones these days just don't see the point of why they would pay for those data services. This would give them some context for why they are important, and that will lead them to pay for more services like this – or so the hope goes."Just three days after announcing the Facebook purchase, Koum said they were working to introduce voice calls. He also said that new mobile phones would be sold in Germany with the WhatsApp brand and that their ultimate goal was to be on all smartphones.

In August 2014, WhatsApp was the most globally popular messaging app, with more than 600 million users. By early January 2015, WhatsApp had 700 million monthly users and over 30 billion messages every day. In April 2015, Forbes predicted that between 2012 and 2018, the telecommunications industry would lose $386 billion because of over-the-top (OTT) services like WhatsApp and Skype. That month, WhatsApp had over 800 million users. By September 2015, it had grown to 900 million; and by February 2016, one billion.

Voice calls between two accounts were added to the app in March and April 2015.

On November 30, 2015, the Android WhatsApp client made links to another message service, Telegram, unclickable and uncopyable. Multiple sources confirmed that it was intentional, not a bug, and that it had been implemented when the Android source code that recognized Telegram URLs had been identified. (The word "telegram" appeared in WhatsApp's code.) Some considered it an anti-competitive measure, but WhatsApp offered no explanation.

Since 2016
On January 18, 2016, WhatsApp's co-founder Jan Koum announced that it would no longer charge users a $1 annual subscription fee, in an effort to remove a barrier faced by users without credit cards. He also said that the app would not display any third-party ads, and that it would have new features such as the ability to communicate with businesses.

By June 2016, the company's blog reported more than 100 million voice calls per day were being placed on WhatsApp.

On November 10, 2016, WhatsApp launched a beta version of two-step verification for Android users, which allowed them to use their email addresses for further protection. Also in November 2016, Facebook ceased collecting WhatsApp data for advertising in Europe. Later that month, video calls between two accounts were introduced.

On February 24, 2017, (WhatsApp's 8th birthday), WhatsApp launched a new Status feature similar to Snapchat and Facebook stories.

On May 18, 2017, the European Commission announced that it was fining Facebook €110 million for "providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" in 2014. The Commission said that in 2014 when Facebook acquired the messaging app, it "falsely claimed it was technically impossible to automatically combine user information from Facebook and WhatsApp." However, in the summer of 2016, WhatsApp had begun sharing user information with its parent company, allowing information such as phone numbers to be used for targeted Facebook advertisements. Facebook acknowledged the breach, but said the errors in their 2014 filings were "not intentional".

In September 2017, WhatsApp's co-founder Brian Acton left the company to start a nonprofit group, later revealed as the Signal Foundation, which developed the WhatsApp competitor Signal. He explained his reasons for leaving in an interview with Forbes a year later. WhatsApp also announced a forthcoming business platform to enable companies to provide customer service at scale, and airlines KLM and Aeroméxico announced their participation in the testing. Both airlines previously launched customer services on the Facebook Messenger platform.

In January 2018, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Business for small business use.

In April 2018, WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum announced he would be leaving the company. By leaving before November 2018, due to concerns about privacy, advertising, and monetization by Facebook, Acton and Koum gave up $1.3 billion in unvested stock options. Facebook later announced that Koum's replacement would be Chris Daniels.

Later in September 2018, WhatsApp introduced group audio and video call features. In October, the "Swipe to Reply" option was added to the Android beta version, 16 months after it was introduced for iOS.

On October 25, 2018, WhatsApp announced support for Stickers. But unlike other platforms WhatsApp requires third-party apps to add Stickers to WhatsApp.

On November 25, 2019, WhatsApp announced an investment of $250,000 into the startup ecosystem through a partnership with Startup India to provide 500 startups with Facebook ad credits of $500 each.

In December 2019, WhatsApp announced that a new update would lock out any Apple users who hadn't updated to iOS 9 or higher and Samsung, Huawei, Sony and Google users who hadn't updated to version 4.0 by February 1, 2020. The company also reported that Windows Phone operating systems would no longer be supported after December 31, 2019. WhatsApp was announced to be the 3rd most downloaded mobile app of the decade from 2010 to 2019.

In early 2020, WhatsApp launched its "dark mode" for iPhone and Android devices – a new design consisting of a darker palette. In March, WhatsApp partnered with the World Health Organization and UNICEF to provide messaging hotlines for people to get information on the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic. That same month, WhatsApp began testing a feature to help users find out more information and context about information they receive.[clarification needed]

In October 2020, Whatsapp rolled out a feature allowing users to mute both individuals and group chats forever. The mute chat settings now show ‘8 hours', ‘1 week', and ‘Always' options. The ‘Always' option replaces the ‘1 year' option that was originally part of the settings.

In January 2021, WhatsApp announced a new Privacy Policy which users would be forced to accept by February 8, 2021, or stop using the app. The policy would allow WhatsApp to share data with its parent company, Facebook. The policy does not apply in the EU, since it violates the principles of GDPR. Facing a pushback about Facebook data sharing and lack of clarity, WhatsApp postponed the update to May 15, 2021, but announced they have no plans to limit the functionality of the app for those who don't approve the new terms or to give them persistent reminders to do so.

On March 1, 2021, WhatsApp started rolling out support for third-party animated stickers in Iran, Brazil and Indonesia. On March 24, 2021, WhatsApp launched third-party animated stickers worldwide.

In July 2021, WhatsApp announced the development of an Android beta version update supporting the sending of uncompressed images and videos in 3 options: Auto, Best Quality and Data Saver. The same month, the Android beta enabled end-to-end encryption for cloud backups, stored in Facebook's cloud. The backup is locked by a passcode and 64-digit recovery key and cannot be accessed without them. The company is also testing multi-device support, which would allow users to launch WhatsApp on their desktop devices without keeping their phone session active.

On October 4, 2021, Facebook had its worst outage since 2008. The outage also affected other platforms owned by Facebook, such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Security experts identified the problem as possibly being DNS-related.

In December 2021, it was reported that WhatsApp started hiding users' online status, called "Last Seen" in the app from people that are not in the user's contacts or that the user has not had a conversation with yet. The option is set by default but can be changed to allow all contacts to see a user's online status

How to draw



 * 1) Draw a Ball.
 * 2) Color it Light Green.
 * 3) Color inside it, the “phone 📞 icon” white.
 * 4) Draw eyes and you’re done.

Family

 * Metaball - Adoptive mother.
 * Faceblock - Hey brother.
 * Facebook Messengerball - My second brother.
 * [[File:Instagram-icon.png]] Instagramcube - My sister.

Friends
W.I.P.

Frenemies
W.I.P.

Enemies
Telegramball - A Russian version copycat of Whatsappball An enemy of me since 2013, so many of my fans move to yuo because your existence, Damn yuo!

Trivia
Fun facts

Comments
O ZAP ZAP ZAP

-- Undhee (talk) 16:23, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

They should remove that image, that I remember the circle-tool is prohibited in the polandball universe --Hispanic Empire (talk) 20:16, 4 April 2022 (UTC)