LONDON: Currently, 2.12.96 is the latest beta version of WhatsApp for Android, which can be downloaded from the official website. If you’re a newbie and didn’t get to study the history of WhatsApp, we will tell you shortly that this application was released six years ago, being created by two former Yahoo! employees, who were rejected by Mark Zuckerberg when they applied for a job at Facebook.
This bad luck was actually a good thing, because with the money they saved while they worked for Yahoo!, they developed an application that managed to become extremely popular in short time. At the beginning of 2013, WhatsApp already had 200 million users and at the end of the year, their number was doubled. When Zuckerberg became aware of the ascension of WhatsApp, he offered the two founders 19 billion dollars and bought the application from them. Since then, WhatsApp continued to be improved, and nowadays, it has the largest number of active users: over 800 million.
In February, the version for Android received the Voice Calling feature and later, this feature was implemented for BlackBerry 10 and iOS as well. If at first there were serious issues with the voice calls – echoes, lags and sudden ends, in the meantime, these problems were solved, but still, the users are complaining about the enormous data usage. The v2.12.96 has bug fixes, enhanced voice quality and changes in the calling interface, but also, it inherited a lot of older features: the option to hide the blue tick marks for read messages, the possibility to add thumbnails in large video chat, to show unread messages on the home screen widget, to share or save profile photo or group code, there was added a camera shortcut for taking photos faster etc.
When installing APK files from other sources than Google Play store where only stable versions are uploaded, you must enable the Unknown Sources option from your device’s Settings.
