Advertisment

WhatsApp to be bought by Facebook?

author-image
Supriya Rai
New Update

BANGALORE, INDIA: The highly popular free messaging and file sharing application WhatsApp may be bought by social networking site Facebook, according to a report on TechCrunh. ''Whatsapp, the multiplatform mobile messaging app that has been one of the runaway success stories for ad-free, paid services, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, according to sources close to the matter. We're still digging around on potential price and other details about how advanced the deal is,'' says the report.

Advertisment

WhatsApp, an application available for Android, BlackBerry OS, iOS, Series 40, Symbian, and Windows Phone, was developed in 2009 and became one of the most downloaded apps in a short span of time. Last year, WhatsApp users apparently sent over a billion messages a day. ''Just how much is 1 billion messages? That is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second,'' says a blog post on WhatApp website.

The app is currently the number 2 paid app in Apple's App Store. On Google Play , it is free for the first year, and then $0.99 per year thereafter. It's also currently the most popular free app on Google Play. According to Google, the app has had between 100 million and 500 million installs so far.

However, the app has had its share of problems. In May 2011, there was a security hole reported in WhatsApp, which left user accounts open for hijacking. Also, On January 6, 2012, an unknown hacker published a website (WhatsAppStatus.net) which made it possible to change the status of an arbitrary WhatsApp user, as long as the phone number was known. To let it work, it only required a restart of the app. According to the hacker, it is only one of the many security issues in WhatsApp. And, last week there was a status error problem with WhatsApp, which lead to a lot of panic with hoax messages on the same being circulated. It took over 12 hours for the problem to get fixed.

That said, how do you feel about Facebook buying WhatsApp? Despite the problems mentioned above, is WhatsApp still your favorite app under the free messaging applications category? Do let us know.

(With inputs from Wikipedia)

insides