When installed, it creates a user account with the user’s phone number as the username. WhatsApp employs a variant of the open standard Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). In the month of February 2017, WhatsApp reached about 200 million monthly active users in India. In May 2014, WhatsApp reached 50 million monthly active users in India, its largest country by the number of monthly active users, and then 70 million in October 2014, accounting for 10% of WhatsApp’s total user base. In terms of the total number of users, India is by far WhatsApp’s most lucrative place. WhatsApp was then acquired by Facebook in 2014, but it continues to operate as a separate app with a singular focus on developing a messaging service that works quickly and reliably anywhere in the world.
Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who had previously spent 20 years combined at Yahoo, founded WhatsApp on Feb 24, 2009.
WhatsApp Messenger, or simply WhatsApp, is a Facebook, Inc.-owned freeware, voice-over-IP (VoIP) service, and cross-platform centralized messaging.
