WhatsApp’s popularity is partly down to the app constantly producing new features.
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WHATSAPP AND SIGNAL have a lot in common: they’re both messaging apps that support text, voice, and video. They can also make use of group chats, status updates, and share much of the same codebase for encrypting communications.
Still, WhatsApp’s the pick for billions of people, while Signal is in the low tens of millions. This said, due to Signal’s focus on privacy, there’s often a spike in downloadsinthewakeofprivacyscandals, such as the security bug discovered by Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri in 2023, where WhatsApp secretly activated the microphone on his Pixel phone.
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At the time of writing, WhatsApp has over 2.8 billion active users, and is expected to pass 3 billion in 2024, making it by far the world’s most popular messaging application. That’s not bad for an app that started out in 2009 as a simple way to update statuses on iPhones.
The app currently supports text, voice and video calls to individuals and groups of up to 512 people. There are also thousands of ‘Community’ groups, which are simply a larger version of group chats.