WhatsApp Blog

https://blog.whatsapp.com/helping-you-find-more-channels-and-businesse… How long until "Updates" gets a red badge despite no updates only to show you an ad? Also, I find the language used in their announcement deeply offensive. > Helping you Find More Channels and Businesses on WhatsApp > support your favorite channel > help you discover > find a new business and easily start a conversation with them > help admins, organizations, and businesses grow

"This means we will always protect your personal conversations with end-to-end encryption" / https://blog.whatsapp.com/giving-more-time-for-our-recent-update / Why is "personal" present in that sentence? EDIT Finally, here's the real reason for the changes: > "While not everyone shops with a business on WhatsApp today, we think that more people will choose to do so in the future and it’s important people are aware of these services." My wife recently started to complain about the new instagram UI and that there are shops _everywhere_, and that the UI has reorganised buttons so people will find themselves at shops if they follow muscle memory. Apparently that's the future of WhatsApp.

"Status could also open up new advertising opportunities for WhatsApp. If it followed Snap and Instagram’s lead, it could insert full-screen ads in-between friends’ Statuses." If this is implemented, it'd be a shame, coming from a company that posted this - https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads

> My parents use WhatsApp on generations-old phones - it performs great and it's simple enough to understand WhatsApp dropped support for legacy phone platforms (Symbian, Android 2.2<, iOS 6, WinMo 7) at the end of 2016 in pursuit of fancy features. > While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don't offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app's features in the future.[1] I miss the independent, $1/yr WhatsApp, it was all features and no bloat. 1. https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000617/WhatsApp-support-for-mobile-devices

Worth reading of course is the post (pre FB acquisition) on why they don't sell ads: https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads

I'm pretty ignorant about whatsapp, but I paged through their blog a couple hours ago, before reading this post (https://blog.whatsapp.com/). And the fact that they had blog posts about Windows Mobile, Nokia, and Blackberry clients really stood out. I think Google, Facebook et al probably prioritize those platforms last, if at all. So kudos to Whatsapp for their contrarian thinking. Their blog also shows the achievements of 1M and 2M simultaneous connections on a box, which I remember seeing here before on HN. So these guys are also very talented and experienced engineers.

I got to about 500K processes on Erlang's VM on an i7 with lots of memory. These people people got up to 2M concurrent TCP connections http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2011/ And on top of it, it is using isolated heaps. That is beautiful I think. Completely concurrent GC is beautiful. I know Erlang syntax is not to for everyone's taste (I do like it though). There is also Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/). But the underlying BEAM VM is an awesome piece of technology. > The thought was to have a billion threads on a SPARCStation 10 There are some green-thread C libraries I've been playing with, like Protothreads ( http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/index.html ) and libconcurrency ( https://code.google.com/p/libconcurrency/ ) I think they use setjump/longjump trick. Some use setcontext()/getcontext() POSIX call. I still like Erlang VM best.

> Node was created to not handle error conditions? How is that defensible in a HTTP server? It depends on what you expect, giving the programming language, runtime, and the philosophy of those who developer the former, latter, or both. Erlang is famous for the "let it crash" tenet [0], and I doubt you get something most programmers are comfortable with. However, I doubt most programmers I know (I will not assume about others) can scale to WhatsApp, which more or less runs a REST API on Erlang to great scale. [1] This is not to say the two things are perfectly related, but there are different methods and philosophies around error handling and conditions. Some are comfortable with Node, others are not. [0] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LetItCrash [1] http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2011/

<3 I always love seeing your comments and questions, too! Well on the subject of PHP, I think I've got a nice story. The more recent one is about Wordpress. One day, I had this conversation: Boss: "will the blog stay up?" toast0: "yeah, nobody goes to the blog, it's no big deal" Boss: "they will" toast0: "oh, ummmm we can serve a static index.html and that should work" Later that day, he posted https://blog.whatsapp.com/facebook I took a snapshot to serve as index.html and the blog stayed up. A few months later, I had a good reason to tear out WordPress (which I had been wanting to do for a long time), so I spent a week and made FakePress which only did exactly what we needed and could serve our very exciting blog posts in something like 10-20 ms per page view instead of whatever WordPress took (which was especially not very fast if you hit a www server that wasn't in the same colo as our database servers). That worked pretty well, until the blog was rewritten to run on the FB stack --- page weight doubled, but since it was served by the FB CDN, load time stayed about the same. The process to create and translate blog entries was completely different, and the RSS was non-compliant: I didn't want to include a time with the date, and there is/was no available timeless date field in any of the RSS specs, so I just left the time out ... but it was sooo much nicer to run. Sadly, I haven't been doing any large scale optimization stuff lately. My work stuff doesn't scale…

An excellent source of information on the motives of UK legislators for passing this legislation, other than the incompetence and malice hypothesised in the other comments, is this parliamentary research briefing from 2022 [1], which summarises the previous five years of consultation and links to a heap of previous white papers and critical responses. The "news" is that on 17 April 2023, the heads of WhatsApp, Signal and other companies published an open letter questioning "the Government's stated intention to protect end-to-end encryption and respect the human right to privacy" [2], and on 27 April 2023, a member of the House of Lords said that "services such as WhatsApp will potentially leave the UK" [3] if the Bill is passed. The debate is actually pretty informed and a refreshing antidote to the cynicism about democracy expressed elsewhere, until you recall that the House of Lords is not that democratic. [1]: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9506/ [2]: https://blog.whatsapp.com/an-open-letter [3]: https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2023-04-27/debates/AC7C700F-39F3-4…

The way you framed the question, it seems so obvious that they "had to find a way to monetize". But there were probably some inflection points. This is where the issue of the customer trusting the website/app comes in. Initially, WhatsApp was charging a very small fee ($1 a year?) and making it appear as if they were doing it to avoid selling customer data. The following post has already been linked many times during the related comment threads, but I am posting it again because I bet most people never actually read the whole thing. ---------- Link: https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads Text: When we sat down to start our own thing together three years ago we wanted to make something that wasn't just another ad clearinghouse. We wanted to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads. No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn't). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake... and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement. Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the…

Granted this is speculation, but I've done my homework: 1) Extreme concurrency due to Erlang underneath, which means not only being able to handle lots of connections at once, but very good DDoS resistance. See WhatsApp's blog post about it: http://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 An Elixir (or Erlang) process can fire up a million new nodes in a second on commodity hardware. No joke. The out-of-the-box concurrency in Elixir replaces many tools in Ruby that are normally separate gems: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/ruby-concurrency-needs-microser… 2) Near-100% uptime possible. (Google "Whatsapp uptime"). Erlang was designed to run cell networks. It made them very reliable. The entire philosophy of the language is to "embrace failure, log it and try again ASAP." This ends up being a very good strategy when dealing with the uncertainty of the real world, and things like security concerns. 3) Live code upgrades without downtime. See this demo: https://youtu.be/96UzSHyp0F8 4) MUCH nicer syntax than Erlang. Especially for ex-Rubyists. It's a functional language (with all the advantages that provides) with a Ruby-flavored syntax. Best of all worlds. 5) Phoenix, the Rails-equivalent web API, has come out of the gate with a 2 to 10x performance improvement over Rails using a fraction of the CPU load: http://www.littlelines.com/blog/2014/07/08/elixir-vs-ruby-showdown-pho… 6) Elixir provides true macros (in the Lisp sense). It…

> Then, an opportunity arose to use Elixir but, because of its early stage (this was right between 0.3 and 0.4), I couldn't deploy it in a production environment, so I ended up choosing Clojure. At the time (and still today) I would probably have done the same. We still need a couple more months before we can stamp "Production Ready" in it. > No need to; one could just adapt ClojureScript to spit out Erlang. It would depend on the JVM and wouldn't support native macros, but it would work ok, I guess. I guess I can eventually take a look at this as well for fun. :) > I understand it might be premature, but I would love to know what kind of projects/developers is Elixir attracting? My background is web development, so expect something in this area in the future. It always amazes me how people like the What's App guys can get 2 million TCP connections in a single Erlang node (source: http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2011/). With web sockets and native clients becoming more and more common, having powerful abstractions around TCP connections seems like a good idea.

https://blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-parent-managed-accounts-on-whats… It’s very recent but WhatsApp are giving you exactly what you want!

Source: https://blog.whatsapp.com/new-feature-roundup-missed-call-messages-new…

June 18, 2012 -> https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads Almost 13 years to the day! I find it really frustrating that I am not able to avoid using whatsapp due to how popular it is to the point that it’s become the go-to communication channel for most things :/

> AFAIK, whatsapp is still dependent on your mobile being the primary source. It has "link a device" feature, which has some of the features but cannot be used as an independent client. Not anymore https://blog.whatsapp.com/one-whatsapp-account-now-across-multiple-pho…

What do you mean? WhatsApp rolled out E2E encryption between 2014 and 2016. It’s by far the largest messaging service that is e2e encrypted by default. I think it’s more than fair to call it ahead of the curve for a service of its size. https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/ https://blog.whatsapp.com/end-to-end-encryption

"core bussiness" is finding and dispatcching drivers including payments. Everything in-app. > I can't imagine trying to deal with 1m+ concurrent tcp connections. 2 million connections on a BSD mchine is doable though not trivial and that too even in 2012. https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011

Ten years ago WhatsApp was a paid app on the App Store. They changed it to an annual subscription model (with plenty of loopholes to skip the payment), and then about 6 years ago they finally made it free. Announcement of changing from upfront paid to subscription: https://blog.whatsapp.com/i-phone-v2-10-1-release-notes Announcement of removing the subscription altogether: https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-whats-app-free-and-more-useful

Yes. The international standard for getting shit done when you need to order direct. Also nice that they are building out product catalogs. In the developing world sometimes it is difficult to get a list of products with prices. https://blog.whatsapp.com/introducing-catalogs-for-small-businesses/?l…

Since you worked at WhatsApp, you'd have seen it first hand how Rick Reed et al pushed the boundaries of FreeBSD network stack and Erlang BEAM... 2M+ (TCP) long-lived connections per server, though presumably to different (CGNAT?) destinations back in 2012: https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011/ Acknowledging that WhatsApp may have never hit the limits Cloudflare has, did FreeBSD make it easier than it would have been on Linux [0]? Is it common for network load balancers to instead bypass the kernel (xdp, netmap, snabbswitch etc) and take over connection management entirely (perhaps, along with a hand-rolled TCP/IP flow manager)? [0] I know Linux isn't all that bad, Marek: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-receive-a-million-packets/ (:

Unfortunately it seems post-Facebook acquisition they ended support for (at least some of) those platforms. https://blog.whatsapp.com/whats-app-support-for-mobile-devices

Whatsapp had 700m+ monthly users in early 2015 [1] before they scrapped their subscription fee in early 2016 [2]. Whatsapp was free to use in some jurisdictions for the first year, so we can't assume there was $700m in revenue, but there was certainly enough to pay for 50 engineers you would think. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/whatsapp-passes-700-million-2015-1 [2] https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-whats-app-free-and-more-useful

https://blog.whatsapp.com/on-e-millio-n?lang=en English version

Thanks! Looks like they link Facebook's 10Q filing. Can't tell how they arrived at the number though. I agree that their losses were surprisingly high at the time... especially given how lean their engineering team and operations were supposed to be. (https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011/?lang=en)

WhatsApp have been focusing on payments lately[0] so it only makes sense for Signal to put efforts into that, too. [0]: https://blog.whatsapp.com/send-payments-in-india-with-whatsapp/?lang=e…

The WhatsApp acquisition comes to mind: 1. Promise to not hoard and sell user data: https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads 2. Get acquired by arguably the largest ad network and data hoarding giant 3. Proceed to flow user data to FB, forcing it down the throat of all their users

The relevant blog post, that the article doesn't link to: https://blog.whatsapp.com/more-information-about-our-update Goes into slightly more detail then the article, and also takes obvious jabs at Telegram and Signal.

Remember when WhatsApp were all "Yes, we're being bought by Facebook, but we're going to preserve your privacy"? https://blog.whatsapp.com/setting-the-record-straight At some point, words become meaningless platitudes that are simply invalidated by the next big ToS update. Facebook have a major incentive in being able to read our messages, so I fully expect them to march in the direction of figuring out how to sell the the walkback of e2e in the future. It'll be dressed up as for our "safety" or so that their "partners" can add some sort of "value", but it will come.