Today we bring you a list of certain WhatsApp curiosities that you probably did not know, it can give you an idea of some of the most interesting secrets about the most famous instant messaging application in the world today.

That WhatsApp consumes us many hours a day is not an issue that we discover now, it is an application that is part of our day-to-day to maintain contact with our friends, family, and others, although other options have emerged over time.

We are talking about the famous alternatives to WhatsApp, Telegram is one of the most used, although it is not the only one because it has more possibilities, but the success of WhatsApp may lie in how simple it is to use it, in that it is free and also that almost everyone has.

Meaning of WhatsApp

Have you ever wondered what WhatsApp means? Well, we will reveal it to you below. You are probably guessing that it comes from English, two English words have really been joined to form the word WhatsApp that we all know today.

WhatsApp comes from the “What’s up?”, an English expression that in Spanish would be something like “What’s up?” or “How’s everything going?” So what they did was join “What’s” with “app” and from there came the word WhatsApp, something that is still curious.

Its founder has humble origins

Jan Koum, one of the founders of WhatsApp, arrived in California in 1992 with the sole company of his mother. This young Ukrainian immigrant met Brian Acton in 1997 without knowing that they would become friends and found WhatsApp.

In addition, to create the app they were not the only ones, but they used the help provided by other immigrants with whom they shared a neighborhood. Little by little they financed the project that we know today as WhatsApp.

WhatsApp arrived in Spain in 2009

It was in 2009 when we discovered WhatsApp and it was around that time that we began to say goodbye to SMS and Messenger, although back then it was still our best ally when it came to communicating with friends.

WhatsApp first landed on iOS and then came to Android and other operating systems. Keep in mind that a decade ago, Windows Phone existed and there was also BlackBerry, although now there is no trace of these two operating systems.

The application became popular in a short time due to its free nature and ease of use, and unleashed a revolution that had not been seen until now, so much so that SMS almost disappeared and even later some operators included SMS in their mobile rates.

They almost did away with SMS

The arrival of WhatsApp was a serious setback for operators because until now there had been no free application with which to chat in such a simple and effective way with our relatives, SMS was an option, but they were not exactly free.

WhatsApp burst into force and in a short time everyone already had WhatsApp to talk to their contacts in a simple way, perhaps therein lies the key that led to the almost disappearance and use of SMS, which are no longer used today.

What’s more, some operators even add an SMS pack to their rates to spend and not cost you money and tried to create alternatives to WhatsApp without success in order to have their own service. Right now Telegram is a good alternative , although there are many more.

WhatsApp was not an instant messaging app

WhatsApp was not created to be a messaging app, actually, the usefulness of WhatsApp, according to its creators, was to see if the person we wanted to talk to was online. If he was “On-Line”, it would mean that we could call him and he would answer us.

It has a beta version to test what’s new

In case you didn’t know, WhatsApp has a beta version for Android and another for iOS that basically allows you to test WhatsApp news before anyone else since it is the first version of the app that includes them in “test” mode and then launches them immediately. official form.

It is an app that can be downloaded by any user, both with an Android phone and an iPhone since the beta is accessible to anyone. Of course, being a test version you can find bugs, although in general, they work quite well.

WhatsApp was not always free

At first, WhatsApp was not free, and when the app landed it offered a year for free and then you had to pay €0.89 to use it for another year. There were different prices and plans, from one year, three years and up to 5 years, the latter two with very interesting discounts.

The payment of the service was in force (not for all) until the year 2015-2016. Continuing with the payment, a few days before the renewal of the annual fee, a dialog box appeared indicating the need to make the payment or the service would be unusable.

The latter was a bit of a cheat since many users were automatically renewed without having entered a bank card or anything. The truth is that paying for WhatsApp is something that today we would surely not consider.

Not everyone paid their share, and this, according to experts, is what led to the growth of WhatsApp worldwide. In any case, it should not be ruled out that users have to pay to use a WhatsApp functionality, although this will depend on each user.

Until 2013 you couldn’t send videos and photos

At first, WhatsApp only allowed the sending of messages, that’s why we say that it was the beginning of the end of SMS. It was not until 2015 that voice calls arrived and WhatsApp Web appeared, then in 2016 video calls arrived, and in 2017 WhatsApp States.

It was not until 2017 that the possibility of deleting messages for everyone with certain restrictions came to the app. At first, we only had 7 minutes, now we have more time to delete those messages, plus we know how to recover deleted messages.

2017 was a good year since WhatsApp Business emerged to improve communication between companies and customers. This app is independent of the usual WhatsApp and today it is still active and used by numerous companies.

The founder of WhatsApp was rejected on Facebook

Brian Acton, one of the founders of WhatsApp, wanted to go to work at Facebook but was rejected. This is a great curiosity because a few years later he would be CEO of WhatsApp and would be part of Facebook.

Facebook bought WhatsApp for $21.8 billion

It was the year 2014 when Facebook launched the offer on WhatsApp’s table and they accepted, but the curiosity does not stop here, but few know that Google also wanted to buy WhatsApp for a figure of 16,000 million dollars. To this day, WhatsApp is still part of Facebook, just like Instagram.

A successful app without advertising costs

Despite the rumors, it is thought that WhatsApp will never have advertising. The founders of WhatsApp never invested in advertising, “word of mouth” was enough, and seeing WhatsApp numbers it is normal to think that advertising is not necessary.

As of 2021, we still have no indication that WhatsApp will include advertising of any kind and it does not seem that this will happen, after all, Facebook and Instagram already offer ads and the reported income is probably more than enough.

WhatsApp figures and data

WhatsApp exceeded the barrier of 2,000 million active users in a month, and it is estimated that an average of 41 million messages are sent every minute, which is why WhatsApp sometimes crashes at certain times of high traffic, such as New Year’s Eve because the message rate rises above normal.

In any case, this has improved in recent years and these types of crashes hardly occur on such special days anymore, however, it can suffer crashes from time to time due to some type of failure, as happened with the last one that had the app without service for 6 hours.

We spend many hours on WhatsApp every day and open the app an average of 25 times a day. Regarding the average age of WhatsApp users, it is difficult to estimate it since in the last 3 years, the user profile has changed a bit, but it is estimated that the user profile that uses WhatsApp the most has an age between 30 and 45 years old.

As a curious fact, you should know that WhatsApp is present in more than 180 countries, even so its use is prohibited in several of them (China, North Korea, etc.). As you can see, there are many curious facts about WhatsApp and probably many of them you did not know yet.