End-to-end encryption is still guaranteed, and Meta also said that if users only use the app to call or message their contacts, there will be “no change to [the] experience at all,” though for many, this promise simply isn’t enough.

The launch upends its founders’ original mission of creating an app with ‘No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!’ This week, WhatsApp did something its founders said it would never do: it’s putting advertisements inside the app. It ends WhatsApp’s decade-plus run of offering an ad-free messaging and calling experience.

WhatsApp monetization begins, potentially adding $15B+ annual revenue from Meta Platforms, Inc.'s nearly 3B global users. Click for my META stock update.

After the tech giant announced it would begin to include ads in WhatsApp’s Updates tab, which is used by roughly 1.5 million people per day, Signal president Meredith Whittaker took to X to lure users to her messaging tool: “Use Signal,” she wrote. “We promise, no AI clutter, no surveillance ads—whatever the rest of the industry does.”

Iranian state television on Tuesday afternoon urged the country's public to remove the messaging app WhatsApp from their smart phones, alleging without offering any evidence the app gathered user information to send to Israel.

Meta is adding three ad features to WhatsApp. This represents the company’s most significant monetization push for the messaging platform, which has become a global communication standard across multiple continents.

You can now create and modify images using ChatGPT’s AI chops inside WhatsApp without having to use the ChatGPT app at all. WhatsApp, the MetaAI-owned messaging app, caused more than a little controversy recently when it added a new Meta AI button to its interface that was impossible to remove.