Remember that WhatsApp doesn’t have user accounts in the traditional sense you sign up using your mobile phone number, which is validated by sending an SMS message to your phone. How to get started with WhatsApp Jesse Hollington / Digital TrendsĪlthough WhatsApp is available for iPhone, Android, macOS, and Windows, you’ll need to start with your smartphone. WhatsApp has a native Mac app currently available as a public beta that you can download directly from its website it will undoubtedly find its way onto the Mac App Store once it’s ready for final release. These are distributed through the Microsoft Store and Mac App Store and set a similarly low bar for system requirements: Windows 10.1 or newer for Windows PCs or macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or newer for Macs.Īs of this writing, the version of WhatsApp Desktop available on the Mac App Store is simply a wrapper for WhatsApp Web. There are also WhatsApp Desktop apps for both Windows and macOS. WhatsApp requires Android 4.1 or newer or iOS 12 or newer, so compatibility shouldn’t be a problem. Note that WhatsApp does not provide a version of the app that’s optimized for Android tablets or iPad. WhatsApp is available in mobile versions for both Android and iPhone you can find it on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. How to download WhatsApp Joe Maring/Digital Trends You can also create group chats with up to 1,023 of your closest friends and use WhatsApp to place audio and video calls to any other WhatsApp user. You can exchange all sorts of rich media - from full-resolution photos and video clips to documents, audio recordings, stickers, and animated GIFs. However, WhatsApp goes well beyond simple one-on-one chats. While this design means you need a mobile phone number to use WhatsApp, that’s kind of the point - and one of the likely reasons the platform has become so successful. The extent of your user profile is a name, photo, and brief 140-character “about” status. Further, there’s nothing to log into beyond confirming your mobile number the first time you set up WhatsApp on a new device. You don’t need to worry about knowing nicknames or usernames to communicate with your friends you only need a phone number. Like SMS/MMS and Apple’s iMessage, there are no accounts to set up, and communications are based entirely on phone numbers. Much of the magic of WhatsApp is in its elegant simplicity. While it’s still tied to mobile phones, it works equally well on both the iPhone and Android platforms, and there are Mac and Windows apps and even a web client that works in any modern browser. Nevertheless, while Apple created a solution for its own club of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, and Google floundered about, WhatsApp created a platform-agnostic solution that just worked. Still, its attempts felt rudderless and never gained much traction, at least not until it more recently embraced the RCS messaging standard. Apple successfully did something similar in 2011 with its popular iMessage platform, and Google took several stabs at it with a variety of messaging apps. WhatsApp wasn’t the only app to try to address these limitations. Its younger brother, MMS, allows for the exchange of small bits of media, which amount to low-resolution photos and sound bites, but it’s effectively useless for exchanging videos and still lacks things like read receipts and status indicators. SMS was, and continues to be, stuck in the dark ages of technology, with 160-character limits and no support for anything other than pure text. However, the point of WhatsApp was to replace SMS (and the lightly media-capable MMS) with a new platform that could overcome the limitations inherent in the archaic carrier-based messaging services. So, what exactly is WhatsApp? At its most basic level, it’s simply a chat app for exchanging messages with your friends, not unlike the SMS text messaging that’s built into nearly every mobile phone. What is WhatsApp? Joe Maring/Digital Trends Since its 2014 acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), WhatsApp has reached a point where it’s now become the de facto standard for cross-platform messaging worldwide, with over 5 billion installs from the Google Play Store and 2 billion active monthly users. WhatsApp just upgraded its emoji reactions and I want them now You’ll soon be able to use WhatsApp on more than one phone How to know if someone blocked you on WhatsApp
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