WhatsApp Download

Well, this is quite a surprise. After the announcement given at the end of February, we were convinced that no other updated versions of WhatsApp for Nokia devices would be released. In fact, the Facebook-owned app announced that by the end of 2016 no more support will be given on some specific operating systems such as Nokia Asha and Symbian 40. So this week, when we found out that an updated version of WhatsApp for Nokia Asha devices was available, we were rather surprised.

Unfortunately, but predictably, this new 2.13.40 version of WhatsApp for Nokia Ashia doesn’t add any new feature and even the emojis introduced previously are not yet available. What changes is the jar (installation) file, which has been increased with 17KB. In addition, over 1400 files have been modified, and that’s quite remarkable considering that the application itself has a little less than 2066 files.

This latest version 2.12.40 of WhatsApp for Nokia Asha also brings the addition of 19 new files. It is rather difficult to understand the usage of these new files, since most of them have names such as “blc.class”. Now that we’ve seen what changes, let’s see how to install this 2.12.340 Beta version of WhatsApp on your Nokia Asha device.

As usual, first of all you have to open the browser and go to whatsapp.com/s40. From here you can download the .jar file to your Nokia device. Once you’ve completed the download, you need to go back to the location where you’ve saved the file. Now you simply have to tap on it to launch the installation of this latest Beta version of WhatsApp on your Nokia Asha device.

That WhatsApp is the most successful instant messaging app in the world is now an indisputable fact (one billion monthly active users, according to latest statistics), but this scenario doesn’t seem to scare some new competitors. Even if the market of instant messaging apps is nearly saturated (think about Viber, Telegram, and, obviously, Facebook), there are some new companies that want to add something new and different.

That’s the case of a British company named Tengi. This Sheffield-based startup, that is only one year-old, is trying to offer something more to its users: prizes. Tengi’s users can earn by chatting virtual tickets  for a regular free prize draw. The top prize is quite high: £10,000, but there are also hundreds of smaller cash prizes.

Unlike WhatsApp, this new startup earns its revenue also from advertising within the app. But Tengi is not just a commercial product, since its founders encourage their users to make a small donation to the Heart of England Forest Trust. Could this kind of app be a real threat to WhatsApp?  Probably not in the near future, but certainly there are many companies who are not throwing the towel.

More improvements are available for those of you who use WhatsApp with Windows Phone devices. The Facebook-owned instant messaging app has just released an updated Beta version which further enhance the features introduced with the previous updates.So, what changes with this latest 2.12.342 Beta version of WhatsApp for Windows Phone? Let’s see it together.

If you love to send videos to your contacts, you’ll really appreciate this latest beta. In fact now the progress bar works properly when you send large videos, while the not working video progress bar has been definitively removed. If you decide to install this 2.12.342 Beta version of WhatsApp for Windows Phone, you’ll notice also that the new Video Trimmer has been updated. But another important change has been added.

From now on WhatsApp Beta users won’t be allowed anymore to send documents to their contacts who use a public version of WhatsApp. This is what changes with this 2.12.342 Beta version of WhatsApp for Windows Phone. How can you install it on your device? The access to the Beta app is restricted, but you can always download the public version from the Windows Store.

Are you curious to know recent statistics regarding WhatsApp? Well, after the milestone of one billion monthly active users, it seems that WhatsApp is putting an end to text messages. A recent research by yourbudgetcover.co.uk shows that only in the UK the use of text messages (or SMS) has dropped by almost a third since 2011.  At the end of September 2015 UK mobile users sent 102 billion text messages, while in 2011 they were 150 billion. Impressive, isn’t it?

And that’s just in the UK, but we are sure that in other countries the situation is pretty much the same, considering that now WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging app in the world. The situation is so serious that mobile phone operators are increasingly offering incredible deals to their users. Once again, we have to face the fact that WhatsApp is changing everything in the field of communication and it is now a real giant difficult to defeat.

WhatsApp could be slowly destroying one of the biggest and most prominent brands in social media: Twitter. The available statistics prove that not only is WhatsApp far popular than Twitter but it is growing at a much faster rate.

Numbers provided by Statista show that WhatsApp has around 900 million active users worldwide, while Twitter has around 316 million. That means WhatsApp is now almost three times larger than its rival, even though Twitter has been around longer; Twitter started in 2006, while WhatsApp debuted in 2009.

What’s truly interesting is the rate at which WhatsApp is growing compared to Twitter. Information collected by Geek Crunch Reviews shows that the rate at which Twitter has been growing is steadily falling. In early 2013 Twitter was growing at a rate of around 45%, yet by June 2015 it was growing at a rate of less than 20%.

At the same time, WhatsApp’s growth rate was accelerating. Data provided by Statista show that WhatsApp gained 100 million active users between April and September 2015, Empresa-Journal reported . That means WhatsApp was adding around 20 million active users a month.

Is WhatsApp Stealing Users from Twitter?

It looks as if WhatsApp has been gaining users at a steady rate. This rate of growth also raises an interesting question for Twitter: Is WhatsApp taking users away from Twitter, and if so, how many?

That question can be hard to answer because there are undoubtedly some people who use both WhatsApp and Twitter. To make matters worse, some people who switch services may not cancel their accounts, meaning that they could be registered as Twitter users even after they have abandoned the social messaging application.

Twitter has certainly suffered from this situation. Its stock price has fallen dramatically over the past year. On January 7, 2015, Twitter was trading at $37.28 a share; by January 8, 2016, it was trading at $19.98 a share.

That means Twitter has lost nearly half its value in a year. The situation is fairly pathetic because at one point Twitter stock was trading at prices of around $60 a share.

Twitter Is Losing Money While Facebook Is Making It

It is also easy to see why Twitter’s stock price is so low. The company is not making any money, according to data provided by YCharts. Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) reported a net income of -$556.15 million on September 30, 2015. That means the company lost $556.15 million, a little over a half a billion dollars.

To make matters worse, Twitter reported a free cash flow of -$4.808 million, meaning it was losing money on its operations. Not only is Twitter having a difficult time attracting users but it has not been able to generate any cash off the users it has attracted.

Okay, to be fair, WhatsApp loses money too, but it is part of a larger company, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), that makes a lot of money. Facebook reported a net income of $2.828 billion and a free cash flow of $1.412 billion on September 30, 2015. That means Facebook made nearly $3 billion while Twitter lost over half a billion.

Not surprisingly, Facebook’s stock was trading at $97.41 a share on January 8, 2016. That made for an increase of nearly $20 a share from January 8, 2015, when it was trading at $78.17 a share.

Twitter Getting Desperate

The financial numbers show us that Twitter’s business model does not seem to be working, and Twitter seems to know it. The blog Recode reported that Twitter was considering abolishing its famed 140-character limit for tweets.

The reason for this seems to be to allow for more data to be sent out through Twitter; in other words, to make it more like WhatsApp, which allows people to transmit huge amounts of data, including documents and news. Another reason could be to add advertising and other potential money-generating content for Twitter, perhaps to let people send out fiction or even videos and charge for them.

According to the CBC , Twitter is planning to adapt its service so that large files can be embedded within the tweets. The most likely reason for that is to send out news and other large files. The most likely purpose for that change would be to allow the sending of large files, such as magazines or newspapers, over Twitter in order to charge subscriptions for them.

Interestingly enough, Twitter users were very hostile to the idea of large tweets, possibly because it changes the short and simple format the service currently uses. The CBC reported that large numbers of them voiced their displeasure with the idea by sending out negative tweets.

Is Twitter Becoming More Like WhatsApp?

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has apparently backed down somewhat and said the service is merely a means to add large files to Twitter—in other words, yet another scheme to make it more like WhatsApp.

Obviously Dorsey and company would not be trying to make Twitter more like WhatsApp unless they thought there was a need for it. My guess is that large numbers of Twitter users are moving to WhatsApp because they like the ability to send large files, including videos, pictures, and documents, through a messaging service.

Social media seems to be evolving beyond just messages, and social media services are increasingly becoming platforms. WhatsApp is at the cutting edge of this trend by providing a world platform that allows people to send information to anybody that has a smartphone.

The executives at Twitter are afraid they’re getting left behind and that they will soon be losing large numbers of customers to WhatsApp. They’re trying to head off the losses by imitating WhatsApp, a strategy that may not work because WhatsApp already has a much better reputation with users.

Therefore, one has to wonder if it is not a matter of time before Twitter collapses and gets bought up by a competitor, perhaps by Facebook, which already owns WhatsApp and Instagram as well as Facebook Messenger. Twitter would certainly be a good addition to Facebook’s staple of social media brands.

It looks as if WhatsApp is actually killing Twitter; the once popular social media service seems unable to compete in today’s world of social media.

WhatsApp developers are releasing, more frequently than ever (nearly on a daily basis), updated versions  of this popular instant messaging app. Obviously, most of the updates, for the moment, are for the Android version of the app, since it is the most used. Therefore, today we are talking again about a new beta version of WhatsApp for Android, which introduces some interesting updates.

We think that this latest beta version 2.12.535 will be really appreciated betweeen WhatsAppers, because it introduces some formatting changes that will allow WhatsApp users to enliven their messages. If you decide to upgrade your Android device with this version 2.12.535, you’ll be able to format text inside WhatsApp messages as bold or italics. How can you do it? It’s very easy.

For example, if you need to use the bold, you just have to type your text between asterisks (*text*). Similar procedure if you want to use the italics: write your text between underscores (_text_). Your contact will be able to see the formatting if he/she uses an updated version of WhatsApp (so not with the 2.12.510 version but yes with the latest 2.12.535 version). We know, it’s already been noticed that this is the same way used by Google+ and Hangouts to format comments, but still, it’s a useful option.

Other changes have been added to the notifications, where now the sender name is displayed in bold, making it easier to recognize one chat from another. Another important update introduced involves file transfers. With this latest 2.12.535 version of WhatsApp for Android, WhatsApp will automatically convert Google Docs and Sheets from Google Drive to PDF documents, which you can then attach to your messages.

So, if you want to install Beta version 2.12.535 on your Android device, and you have not yet joined the official Play Store Beta Program, you can always download the APK Mirror from here and keep on enjoying your favourite instant messaging app.

There is a new updated version of WhatsApp for Android available, even if for the moment it is only an APK version. Version 2.12.523 doesn’t bring significant improvements, as it happened with the last couple of versions, but it could be useful to download it in any case.

After the sharing documents feature and the revamp of the Settings page, APK version 2.12.523 of WhatsApp for Android, as we said above, doesn’t bring further changes to the app. This latest version just fixes some bugs and improve the stability of the app. This latest 2.12.523 APK runs on all Android devices 2.1 or above and the size of the download file is 27.39 MB.

So, how can you install this latest APK version of Whatsapp for Android? You can download this latest updated version from here. Even if there aren’t any changes, obviously this latest update certainly makes the app stabler and faster.

Are you not only a WhatsApper, but also a fashion addicted? Well, in this case you’ll be glad to know that British Vogue (part of the Conde Nast family) has decided to try a new way to get in touch with its audience using WhatsApp. The fashion magazine is in good company since also BBC and The Huffington Post have decided to send out news alerts through the popular Facebook-owned app.

The news confirms the growing importance of WhatsApp (and of instant messaging applications in general) in the world of communication, since it’s now widely used by journalists around the world to share information and pictures in real time. British Vogue announced its presence on WhatsApp last month with an article, saying that WhatsApp is now a must-have if you “like to share information first”.

So, how can you enroll to the service and receive all the biggest stories in the fashion world? You simply have to save the dedicated number to your phonebook and send FASHION to the Vogue WhatsApp group.

According to the Guardian, the battle between Silicon Valley’s leading companies and US government over encryption has just begun. After the support given to Apple against the FBI, it seems that companies like Whatsapp, Facebook, Google and Snapchat are planning to increase their own privacy technology.

So, it seems that within weeks, WhatsApp will expand encryption to voice calls, while Facebook is planning to strenghten the securities features of its Messenger. According to the Guardian report, also Google is trying to further secure the privacy of its email users. Guardian’s article point out that engineers at major technology firms had already created encrypted messaging products in the past, but such products were never released because they were considered hard to use.

But it seems that the right moment to use these strong privacy tools is arrived, also from a business point of view. What’s interesting is that these projects started before Apple entered its battle  with the Department of Justice (later this month, Apple is due to appear in a federal court in California to fight the order). The public opinion is divided over the case, reports the Guardian. And, of course, any action toward encryption that tech firms may take, will put them against Washington.

There are already two US Senators (Richard Burr of North Carolina and Dianne Feinstein of California) who have written draft legislation that would create penalties for companies that refuse to provide readable user data to Authorities. And Barack Obama seems to be on the same wavelength with this draft and said “If government can’t get in, then everyone’s walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket, right?”. But Jan Koum, the founder of WhatsApp, has a completely different opinion and, on his Facebook account, posted this strong statement “Our freedom and our liberty are at stake.”

Encrypted messaging is already available for those who use WhatsApp with Android and iPhone devices. But it seems that in the near future the instant messaging company will offer its users also encrypted voice calls and encrypted groupe messages. At least that’s what two unknown people said to the Guardian. So far, WhatsApp security functions have always been free for users, and on the matter Koum clearly stated that security is not a bonus feature.

But now it’s difficult to predict if there will be changes in the future. Other sources added that in the coming weeks WhatsApp intends to make a formal announcement about its expanded encryption offerings.