What is WhatsApp?

You've probably heard of it, it's the most popular app ever and is used by 1 billion people worldwide! If you think that this must be a super complex app, it's not. It's just the same as texting but with a lot more people and much cheaper. 

Back in the day if you wanted to send someone a text, the only way was via sms. Every text cost money and especially if you sent a text to another country. This was rather expensive and we needed to find a solution. Those were the olden days! We now have a lot of chatting apps and WhatsApp is the most popular one of them. 

Since the invention of a smartphone, we're able to use the internet on our phones. The inventors of WhatsApp decided to work with that new technology and create something that can transfer texts without having to pay for it. It's easy and quick and can be used anywhere if you have internet acces. 

Not only messaging but also audio and video calling has been made availibe on WhatsApp. It's all for free and easy to use. 

How to use WhatsApp?

First things first, you need to download the WhatsApp app on your smartphone. You can do this via the app-/playstore. The application is free by the way. Once it's installed, you can add all the people you already have in your contacts who also use WhatsApp. The WhatsApping can start now.

This is very easy to use!!!

To call someone just go to the contact and click on the icon to call. Both audio and video calling are availible!

If it happens to be that someone sends you messages and you don't like it, you can always block them. This is very easy: 

1. Just open the chat with that person
2. Click on their name in the navigation bar 
3. Keep scrolling until you see 'Block this contact'

If you decide that you don't want to block the person anymore, you simply follow the same steps and instead of 'block this contact' it will say 'unblock this contact'. By clicking on that the user will be able to send you messages again.

If you want to add a new contact, simply go to the 3rd option in the navigationbar on the bottom of the page and then you will see a little plus sign in the top right corner. You can now add your new contact.

A very useful thing at WhatsApp is thet you can have groupschats. Groupschats are chats with multiple people that allows everyone to answer in the group. How to start one? Very simple: just go to Chats in the navigation and then click on the icon in the top corner on the right. Click on 'Create New Group' and now you can choose the people you want to add to your group. You can add up to a 100 people. 

Facts 

1) The inventors of WhatsApp sold their successful app to Facebook in 2014 for 19 billion dollars. The team that works there is still the same. 

2) Maybe you've heard that you have to pay to send a WhatsApp message or anything like that? Well, since 2016, WhatsApp has taken in all the charges and will not cost money in any single way.

3) WhatsApp has a lot of features. If you have any further questions, you can check out their 'FAQ'. (tip: if you're looking for something, try working in keywords. For example: if you want to know how to add someone ot a groupschat then type 'groupschat' instead of 'how to add someone in a groupschat'.)

4) WhatsApp now has an app for your computer as well so you can send messages over your computer as well. 

Beware

When instelling WhatsApp, you're giving free a lot of information such as your age, gender and interests. WhatsApp then sells this information to stores so they can adjust their advertisements. 

Another thing that's VERY IMPORTANT is that WhatsApp can read all the messages you send out. You should know that billions of messages are send out daily and that the changes of WhatsApp reading your messages, is very small, but do keep in mind.