WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the world, is involved in a recent controversy over its new privacy policy, so its developers even invited users to download other alternatives, in case they do not agree. The app, however, was not created as a chat tool. Do you want to know their origins?
WhatsApp has been leading the market for mobile applications for a long time with which we can use our phone number to create an account and access a chat free, mobile and automatic with which we can communicate with our contact list.
Even so, many surely do not know that the origins of the application they lead us to a very different use. Here’s what it was for more than 10 years ago, when its creators Jan Koum and Brian Acton founded the company.
In 2009, Jan Koum, a Ukrainian-American entrepreneur and former Yahoo! employee, joined Brian Acton, who was also in the ranks of Adobe and Apple. His idea was simple, but already revolutionary: to make the smartphone address book more useful.
The motivation came directly from the experience of Koum, who in May 2009 presented his ideas in the Flyertalk forum, which was the source of inspiration for WhatsApp: “I hate when people try to contact me while I’m on a plane or abroad. So I asked myself: wouldn’t it be great to be able to put a state on my iPhone, like the one we put on Skype or Yahoo Messenger ”.
The idea of WhatsApp, in the beginning, was to serve as a contact book that could show sentences under our names, so that we could signal whether or not we were busy with notices like “on the flight to Japan”, “on vacation”, “call me in two weeks”, etc.
The statuses could be programmed and changed according to schedules, but the most characteristic of this first conception of WhatsApp is that it used the information from your contact list, something that would later evolve to allow direct messages.
The novelty would not take long to arrive, since it would be version 2.0 that would finally integrate the messages. This caused its popularity to grow, reaching 250,000 users in a short time. The rest is history. WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 and is now the most used messaging app in the world.
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