Jan capitalised on this update and did some alterations to Whatsapp, which sent push notifications to friends whenever a user changed his status on the application.įishman’s Russian friends found it fun and started using it to update their own whereabouts and ping each of their friends with statuses like – “I woke late” or “Can’t talk, I’m at the gym”. The motive behind this update was to remind the users when they are not using an installed application. In June 2009, Apple launched the push notifications update. At that time, Acton encouraged by saying – made Koum so disappointed that he lost all the hope and started to look for a new job. Moreover, issues like battery draining, crashing of the app, etc. He demoed WhatsApp to some friends, including Fisherman, but none of them liked it.

He named it ‘WhatsApp’ because it sounded more like what’s up, which aligned with the idea of statuses. Koum succeeded in developing the iOS application and incorporated the ‘WhatsApp inc.’ in California on 24th February 2009 The beginning of the journey was not a smooth one, but they paved their way through like many other successful entrepreneurs. So, Alex introduced them to a Russian developer, Igor Solomennikov, whom he found on. But executing this idea was impossible without the help of an iOS developer. Koum discussed the idea with Acton, and both started visiting Alex Fishman for more insights. He wanted to build an app that shows statuses next to the individual names of the users. Jan Koum bought an iPhone in January 2009 and soon realised the app industry’s potential on few months old App Store.

What the whatsapp