Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
48 free WhatsApp trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This WhatsApp trivia quiz covers the messaging app that three billion people open every month. It starts with the origin story: two ex-Yahoo engineers who were turned down by Facebook, an iPhone bought in January 2009, an app that was only supposed to show statuses, and the push-notification update that accidentally turned it into a messenger. From there it follows the $250,000 seed round, the Sequoia investments, the $1 annual fee, and the February 2014 day Facebook agreed to pay roughly $19 billion for the company. The middle of the quiz is about how WhatsApp actually works and what it added when: the Signal Protocol encryption finished in 2016, WhatsApp Web and its QR code, voice and video calls, stickers, Status, Communities, Channels, edit windows, forwarding limits, the 2 GB file cap and 32-person calls. The final stretch covers the fights: the EU's misleading-information fine, the NSO Group spyware lawsuit, the founders' departures for Signal, the 2021 privacy-policy revolt, and the countries that have blocked the app. Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was verified against the Wikipedia articles on WhatsApp and Jan Koum, and each explanation adds a detail you can use at your next quiz night.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01WhatsApp's two founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, had both previously worked at which internet company?
Yahoo
Yahoo: Koum joined as an infrastructure engineer in 1997 and worked alongside Acton there for nine years; both left in 2007 and took a year off before starting WhatsApp.
Q 02What color do WhatsApp's two check marks turn once the recipient has read a message?
Blue
Blue: WhatsApp added read receipts in November 2014, turning the double grey ticks blue once a message is read; one grey tick means sent and two mean delivered.
Q 03What was WhatsApp originally designed to do before it became a messaging app?
Display statuses next to names in the phone's contacts
When Apple launched push notifications in June 2009, users began pinging each other with jokey custom statuses like 'I woke up late', and it turned into instant messaging almost by accident.
Q 04How much seed funding did Brian Acton raise for WhatsApp from five former colleagues in 2009?
$250,000
$250,000: Acton persuaded five former colleagues to invest that sum in October 2009 and formally joined WhatsApp as a co-founder on November 1 that year.
Q 05Which company made multiple offers to buy WhatsApp in 2010, all of which were declined?
WhatsApp for Android had only launched in August 2010, after Symbian in May and BlackBerry earlier that year.
Q 06Which venture firm, via partner Jim Goetz, bought over 15% of WhatsApp in April 2011?
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital paid about $8 million for more than 15% of WhatsApp in April 2011; its roughly $60 million total investment was worth about $3 billion when Facebook bought the company in 2014.
Q 07In February 2014, a year after a funding round valued it at $1.5 billion, Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for how much?
$19 billion
$19 billion was then the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company: $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and $3 billion in restricted stock for the founders and employees.
Q 08How many staff did WhatsApp have in February 2013, already one of the world's biggest messaging services?
50
WhatsApp had about 50 employees in February 2013 while serving roughly 200 million active users; that month Sequoia put in another $50 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.
Q 09Which research app that Facebook used to monitor competitors' usage influenced its decision to buy WhatsApp?
Onavo
Onavo, a VPN and analytics app Facebook bought in 2013, showed WhatsApp's messaging volume far exceeding Messenger's in key markets; that data helped push Facebook to buy WhatsApp in 2014.
Q 10How much was the annual subscription fee that WhatsApp announced it was dropping in January 2016?
$1
$1 a year: Koum said the fee was a barrier for users without payment cards, and when WhatsApp dropped it in January 2016 he promised the app would not carry third-party ads.
Q 11How much did the European Commission fine WhatsApp's parent in May 2017 for misleading takeover information?
€110 million
€110 million: Facebook had told the Commission in 2014 that automatically matching WhatsApp and Facebook accounts was technically impossible, then began linking user data in 2016, prompting the fine.
Q 12Brian Acton left WhatsApp in September 2017 to fund a nonprofit behind which rival messaging app?
Signal
The Signal Foundation's app uses the same encryption protocol WhatsApp had adopted; Acton explained his exit in a Forbes interview a year later.
Q 13Who was named as Jan Koum's replacement after he announced his departure as WhatsApp CEO in April 2018?
Chris Daniels
Q 21When WhatsApp let users edit sent messages in May 2023, how long was the editing window?
15 minutes
15 minutes: WhatsApp introduced message editing in May 2023 with a 15-minute window after sending; edited messages carry an 'edited' label and recipients are not notified of the change.
Q 22In May 2022, WhatsApp raised its file upload limit from 100 MB to what?
2 GB
2 GB: the May 2022 update raised the per-file limit from 100 MB to 2 GB at a stroke and added a progress counter so senders could track large uploads.
Q 23What is the maximum number of participants in a WhatsApp video call after the June 2024 improvements?
32
32: the June 2024 update raised video calls to 32 participants on every device, added audio to screen sharing and a new codec for reliability; larger groups can use the separate voice-chat feature instead.
Chris Daniels, previously head of Facebook's Internet.org, was named WhatsApp's new head in May 2018; Will Cathcart replaced him less than a year later, in March 2019.
Q 14How many monthly active users did Meta say WhatsApp had reached in 2025?
3 billion
3 billion: in 2025 Meta said WhatsApp had passed three billion monthly active users, after crossing one billion in February 2016 and two billion in February 2020.
Q 15WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption uses a protocol developed by which organisation?
Open Whisper Systems
Open Whisper Systems, the group behind the Signal Protocol, announced its partnership with WhatsApp on November 18, 2014; full end-to-end encryption across every message type was completed in 2016.
Q 16WhatsApp is built on a customised version of which open messaging standard?
XMPP
XMPP: WhatsApp runs a stripped-down binary variant nicknamed FunXMPP, and each account's Jabber ID is its phone number followed by @s.whatsapp.net.
Q 17What do users scan with their phone to log in to WhatsApp Web, which launched in January 2015?
A QR code
A QR code shown at web.whatsapp.com is scanned by the phone's app; at launch the phone had to stay online for the browser session, a requirement dropped with multi-device support in 2021-23.
Q 18In which year did WhatsApp add voice calls between two accounts?
2015
2015: WhatsApp rolled out voice calling to Android in early 2015 and to iPhone that April; by June 2016 it reported over 100 million calls a day, and video calls followed in November 2016.
Q 19Which audio codec does WhatsApp use for its voice calls?
Opus
Opus: WhatsApp's calls use the open Opus codec at 8–16 kHz sampling rates, combining MDCT and linear predictive coding to stay intelligible on poor connections.
Q 20WhatsApp's Status feature, launched on February 24, 2017, mimicked the 'stories' of which two other apps?
Snapchat and Facebook
Snapchat and Facebook stories were the template; Status later gained Voice Status Updates, letting people share voice notes as their status.
Q 24How long can a WhatsApp video message, introduced in July 2023, last?
60 seconds
60 seconds is the cap; like voice messages, video messages are recorded straight into the chat without saving anything to the phone's gallery.
Q 25In which two countries did WhatsApp Channels first launch in June 2023?
Colombia and Singapore
Colombia and Singapore were the June 2023 launch markets for Channels; unlike chats and groups, channel broadcasts are not end-to-end encrypted, and the feature went global in September 2023.
Q 26Which three countries first got WhatsApp's third-party animated stickers in March 2021?
Iran, Brazil and Indonesia
Sticker support itself dates from October 2018, and unusually WhatsApp requires third-party apps to add sticker packs.
Q 27On November 30, 2015, WhatsApp's Android app made links to which rival service unclickable?
Telegram
Telegram: from November 30, 2015 links to telegram.me were rendered unclickable in WhatsApp's Android app; several outlets confirmed it was intentional, and critics called the move anti-competitive.
Q 28Which Israeli surveillance firm did WhatsApp sue in 2019 over spyware injected via voice calls?
NSO Group
NSO Group's Pegasus exploit could infect a phone through a call the target never answered, hitting at least 1,400 users in 20 countries; WhatsApp sued in a San Francisco court in October 2019.
Q 29On which 2016 date did WhatsApp announce end-to-end encryption for all communication on the app?
April 5
April 5, 2016: WhatsApp announced that day that end-to-end encryption now covered every message, call and file on all platforms; a year earlier Heise had shown only Android-to-Android texts were encrypted.
Q 30In which two countries did WhatsApp Pay first become generally available for peer-to-peer transfers?
India and Brazil
India and Brazil: in India WhatsApp Pay runs on the UPI system and launched in November 2020 under a 20-million-user cap; in Brazil the central bank suspended it in June 2020 and it relaunched in May 2021.