How was WhatsApp created? How does it work?

Which one of these service does whatsapp uses A2P or P2P? A2P Does whatsapp pay to various mobile operators like IDEA, LOOP, AIRTEL etc since they are using their number which is owned by the whatsapp user. For instance, I'm a loop mobile customer and I have a whatsapp account and I'm sending a whatsapp message to my friend will the network provider charge whatsapp since the number is of that provider???? If YES then HOW and HOW MUCH? If NO then WHY? Your user account is the phone number, imagine you create an account on facebook with your phone number as your name, will you have to pay the network operator anything? They are separate from the service provider but they use phone numbers to identify users and store those numbers in their database. Whatsapp is free of cost to download and provides free messaging which last 3 years. Means at initial if whatsapp pays the mobile operator companies and they don't charge anything isn't that STUPIDITY because they'll face a HUGE LOSS The way to think about profit and loss is hugely changing. From whatsapp the company gets a lot of data using which they can serve relevant ads. Facebook probably bought them for the user-base they have. They had a user-base already and with the acquisition of whatsapp they now got more users. This is speculation of course. Whatsapp is Ad FREE (means no EARNING from advertisements), Whatsapp is free for a year which can be extended for 2 years more means free for 3 years concludes that no money for 3 years from the users who just downloaded it for free, Database Management is just a speculation as per the blogs in google, then what do they do to have a more than €15m per annum. Same answer as above. This combined with the subscription charges should cover their expenses. I think they have built enough loyalty to sustain but I don't think users will have too much problems reading ads while messaging so I think other apps that do show ads will make more in revenue and profit.

Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19B & http://www.bloomberg.com/video/mark-zuckerberg-whatsapp-is-worth-more-than-19b-bBcCE0UoRj2QMNOvfVVygg.html If you see that way Facebook runs a 24x7 website that has billion users with revenue of $7B. Is it all ads?

WhatsApp Inc., was founded in 2009 by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Koum, both former employees of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!. After Koum and Acton lefthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo! in September 2007, the duo travelled to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_America as a break from work.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 At one point they applied for a job at Facebook but failed.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 For the rest of the following years Koum relied on his $400,000 savings from Yahoo. In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing that the seven-month-old http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store was about to spawn a whole new industry of apps, he started visiting his friend, Alex Fishman in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_San_Jose where the three would discuss "...having statuses next to individual names of the people," but this was not possible without an iPhone developer, so Fishman introduced Koum to Igor Solomennikov, a developer in Russia that he had found on http://RentACoder.com. Koum almost immediately chose the name "WhatsApp" because it sounded like "what’s up," and a week later on his birthday, on February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, early WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck and at a particular point. Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 In June 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. launched http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology, letting developers ping users when they were not using an app. Koum updated WhatsApp so that each time the user changed their statuses, it would ping everyone in the user's network.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 WhatsApp 2.0 was released with a messaging component and the active users suddenly swelled to 250,000. Koum visited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton, who was still unemployed while managing another unsuccessful startup and decided to join the company.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 In October Acton persuaded five ex-Yahoo friends to invest $250,000 in seed funding, and as a result was granted co-founder status and a stake. He officially joined on November 1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS). Koum then hired an old friend who lived in Los Angeles, Chris Peiffer, to make the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerryversion, which arrived two months later.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 WhatsApp was switched from a free to paid service to avoid growing too fast, mainly because the primary cost was sending verification texts to users. In December 2009 WhatsApp for the iPhone was updated to send photos. By early 2011, WhatsApp was in the top 20 of all apps in Apple's U.S. App Store.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 The founders agreed to take $7 million from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Capital on top of their $250,000 seed funding, after months of negotiation with Sequoia partner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Goetz.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 By February 2013, WhatsApp's user base had swelled to about 200 million active users and its staff to 50. Sequoia invested another $50 million, valuing WhatsApp at $1.5 billion.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-History-8 In a December 2013 blog post, WhatsApp claimed that 400 million active users use the service each month.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-9 As of 22 April 2014, WhatsApp had over 500 million http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monthly_active_users, 700 million photos and 100 million videos are shared each day, and the messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages each day.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-10 On August 24, 2014, Koum announced on his http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter account that Whatsapp had over 600 million active users worldwide. WhatsApp added about 25 million new users every month or 833,000 active users per day.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-Parmy_Olsen-4http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-11 With 65 million active users, about 10% of the total worldwide users, India is the largest single country in terms of number of users.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-12 By early January 2015, WhatsApp reached a new milestone of 700 million monthly active users with over 30 billion messages being sent every day.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-13 In April 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbespredicted that between 2012-2018, the telecommunications industry will lose a combined total of $386 billion because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-top_content services like WhatsApp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-14 In the same month, WhatsApp had over 800 million active users.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-15 Platform support[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WhatsApp&action=edit&section=2] After months at beta stage, the application eventually launched in November 2009 exclusively on the App Store for the iPhone. In January 2010, support for BlackBerry smartphones was added, and subsequently for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian OS in May 2010 and for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) in August 2010. In August 2011 a beta for Nokia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40 was added, making it the first non-smartphone OS with official WhatsApp support. A month later support for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone was added, followed by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_10 in March 2013.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-16 In April 2015, WhatsApp launched in the Tizen store, making it available for Samsung Tizen OS.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed] The oldest device currently[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Dates_and_numbers#Chronological_items] capable of running WhatsApp is the Symbian-based http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 released in March 2007. In August 2014, WhatsApp released an update to its Android app, adding support for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Wear smartwatches.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-17 On January 21, 2015, WhatsApp launched a web clienthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-18 which can be used from the browser to send messages. WhatsApp uses a customized version of the open standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Messaging_and_Presence_Protocol.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-21 Upon installation, it creates a user account using one's phone number as the username (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber.org ID: [phone number]@http://s.whatsapp.net). WhatsApp software automatically compares all the phone numbers from the device's address book with its central database of WhatsApp users to automatically add contacts to the user's WhatsApp contact list. Previously the Android and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_40 versions used an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5-hashed, reversed-version of the phone's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Equipment_Identity as password,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-GitHub_venomous0x-22 while the iOS version used the phone's Wi-Fi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address instead of IMEI.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-23http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-24 A 2012 update now generates a random password on the server side.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-25 WhatsApp is supported on most Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Nokia smartphones. All Android phones running the Android 2.1 and above, all BlackBerry devices running OS 4.7 and later, including BlackBerry 10, and all iPhones running iOS 4.3 and later. However, some http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM devices may not be compatible with WhatsApp, though there are some workarounds for this.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-26 Multimedia messages are sent by uploading the image, audio or video to be sent to an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_server and then sending a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink to the content along with its http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64 thumbnail (if applicable).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#cite_note-27 Source: Wikipedia