50 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 50 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
They both applied to work at Facebook after leaving and were rejected, five years before Facebook paid $19 billion for their app.
Q 02The name WhatsApp was chosen because it sounds like which phrase?
What's up
Jan Koum incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California on February 24, 2009, a week after settling on the name and, as it happened, on his 33rd birthday.
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 04In which month and year did WhatsApp first appear on the Apple App Store?
May 2009
A BlackBerry version followed the next month, and Koum nearly quit when the early builds kept crashing until Acton told him to wait a few more months.
Q 05How much seed funding did Brian Acton raise from five ex-Yahoo colleagues in 2009 to become a WhatsApp co-founder?
$250,000
He officially joined the company on November 1 that year, having earlier been working on a different startup idea.
Q 06Which 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 07Which venture firm, via partner Jim Goetz, bought over 15% of WhatsApp in April 2011?
Sequoia Capital
Partner Jim Goetz negotiated for months; the firm eventually earned an approximate 5,000% return when Facebook bought the company.
Q 08On February 19, 2014, Mark Zuckerberg's company agreed to buy WhatsApp for roughly how much?
$19 billion
It was the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in history: $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and $3 billion in restricted stock for the founders.
Q 09How many staff did WhatsApp have in February 2013, already one of the world's biggest messaging services?
50
That same month Sequoia put in another $50 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, a year before Facebook paid more than twelve times that.
Q 10Which research app that Facebook used to monitor competitors' usage influenced its decision to buy WhatsApp?
Onavo
Days after the deal was announced, WhatsApp suffered an outage, and rivals Telegram and Line claimed millions of new sign-ups.
Q 11How much was the annual subscription fee that WhatsApp announced it was dropping in January 2016?
$1
Koum said the fee was a barrier for users without payment cards, and promised the app would not show third-party ads.
Q 12In May 2017 the European Commission fined WhatsApp's parent for misleading takeover information. How much?
€110 million
Facebook had claimed in 2014 that automatically combining WhatsApp and Facebook user data was technically impossible, then began doing exactly that in 2016.
Q 13Brian 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 21WhatsApp's Status feature, launched in 2017, copied which rival apps' stories format?
Snapchat and Facebook
It later gained Voice Status Updates, letting people share voice notes as their status.
Q 22When WhatsApp let users edit sent messages in May 2023, how long was the editing window?
15 minutes
Edited messages are tagged 'edited', and text formatting like code blocks and bulleted lists arrived at the same time.
Q 23In May 2022, WhatsApp raised its file upload limit from 100 MB to what?
2 GB
The same update lifted the maximum group size to 512 members; all-file-type uploads had only been allowed since July 2017.
Q 14Who was named as Jan Koum's replacement after he announced his departure as WhatsApp CEO in April 2018?
Chris Daniels
Koum was thought to have walked away from about $1 billion in unvested stock, but reportedly kept $450 million through a 'rest and vest' arrangement.
Q 15How many monthly active users did WhatsApp report reaching in May 2025?
3 billion
It had passed one billion in February 2016 and two billion in February 2020, and by 2025 was the most popular messenger app in the world.
Q 16WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption uses a protocol developed by which organisation?
Open Whisper Systems
The partnership was announced on November 18, 2014, and the rollout was declared complete for 'every form of communication' on April 5, 2016.
Q 17WhatsApp is built on a customised version of which open messaging standard?
XMPP
A 2019 court document from the NSO Group case named the variant 'FunXMPP'; each account's username is the phone number followed by @s.whatsapp.net.
Q 18What do users scan with their phone to log in to WhatsApp Web, which launched in January 2015?
A QR code
At launch the phone had to stay online for the browser session to work; that requirement disappeared with multi-device support in 2021-23.
Q 19In which year did WhatsApp add voice calls between two accounts?
2015
By June 2016 the company said more than 100 million voice calls a day were being placed; video calls between two accounts arrived in November 2016.
Q 20Which audio codec does WhatsApp use for its voice calls?
Opus
It runs at 8-16 kHz sampling rates and relies on MDCT and linear predictive coding compression.
Q 24What is the maximum number of participants in a WhatsApp video call after the June 2024 improvements?
32
The same update added audio to screen sharing and a new codec for reliability; groups larger than 32 can use the separate 'voice chat' feature instead.
Q 25How long can a WhatsApp video message, introduced in July 2023, last?
60 seconds
Like voice messages, they are recorded straight into the chat without saving anything to the phone's gallery.
Q 26WhatsApp Channels launched in June 2023 in just two countries first. Which two?
Colombia and Singapore
Unlike chats and groups, channel broadcasts are not end-to-end encrypted; the feature went global in September 2023.
Q 27Which 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 28On November 30, 2015, WhatsApp's Android app made links to which rival service unclickable?
Telegram
Multiple sources confirmed it was intentional rather than a bug, and WhatsApp offered no explanation for what critics called an anti-competitive move.
Q 29Which Israeli surveillance firm did WhatsApp sue in 2019 over spyware injected via voice calls?
NSO Group
The Pegasus exploit could infect a phone through a call the target never answered, and hit at least 1,400 users in 20 countries.
Q 30On which 2016 date did WhatsApp announce end-to-end encryption for all communication on the app?
April 5
A German magazine had shown a year earlier that Android-to-Android messages were encrypted but iPhone messages were not yet.