According to the third-party app market statistics APKMirror for 2023, there are approximately 120 million gbwhatsapp users worldwide, 63% of which employ its advanced privacy features as the main purpose. For example, “Hidden online status” (the server metadata exposure rate drops to 0.2% after triggering) and “Message timed destruction” (with 1 second to 30 days supported and the residual data recovery success rate of ≤0.01%). For instance, Indian e-commerce company Mehta Group employed this feature to protect customer order information in 2023. Data leakage incidents fell by 52% month on month. But because its backup files were not encrypted (comprising 78%), 13,000 transaction records were still hacked.
In the technical case, gbwhatsapp fulfilled the “opening of multiple accounts at a time” function by modifying WhatsApp’s original code (adding approximately 38,000 lines of code), which allows for logging in using the same device with up to three accounts (the original version supports one), with the maximum memory usage of 580MB (the original version is 320MB). Tests conducted by market research firm Omdia show that after Nigerian cross-border traders used the dual-open functionality, their per-day order volume increased from 90 to 240 (a growth rate of 167%), but the likelihood of equipment temperature being 43℃ (ambient temperature 25℃) increased by 29%. In March 2024, in a money laundering scheme busted by the Brazilian police, the offenders utilized the dual-opening aspect to take advantage of eight accounts and transfer funds. But since the IP addresses were not completely anonymized, they were eventually traced and detected.
Driven by personal requirements, gbwhatsapp has over 80,000 theme templates (with 1.5 million times average daily downloads), and is able to support the HSL color model in order to dynamically adjust interface elements, such as adjusting the transparency of message bubbles from 0% to 100% (reducing the accidental touch rate by 18%). When employing 4K dynamic themes on Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, the GPU utilization rose from 22% to 37%, and the battery life decreased by 1.3 hours (the stock theme only decreased by 0.4 hours). Indonesian social media content creators saw a 210% increase in video views in 2023 using the “Neon Pulse” theme to interact with fans. Albeit this, due to the fact that ad SDKs have been added to theme files (detection rate is 13%), the complaint rate among users has increased by 45%.
On commercial grounds, gbwhatsapp’s “Auto-reply robot” feature, derived from the GPT-3.5 model, can lower the customer support response time to 0.7 seconds (the average human response time is 10 seconds). As the feature has been added to the Pakistani e-commerce portal Daraz only this year (2024), The number of daily orders being executed increased from 500 to 1,350 (efficiency rate improved by 170%), but because the error response rate improved by 3.8%, the return rate saw a rise by 6%. The EU’s Digital Markets Act requires chatbots to undergo EN 301 549 compliance certification. But gbwhatsapp failed to obtain the concerned certification and incurred a 280,000-euro penalty for French online shopping website Veepee in May 2024.
Legally and from the security perspective, gbwhatsapp was removed from the European market 17,000 times in 2023 for violating the GDPR data minimization rule (falling back on what it refers to as 32 parameters such as device IMEI and MAC address). In 2024, a German court in Munich ruled that the use by a specific enterprise of gbwhatsapp for the transmission of patients’ medical data was illegal, and imposed a fine of 120,000 euros, with 24,000 records of infringement. Tests by the security firm Kaspersky show that the coverage rate of its end-to-end encryption protocol is only 72% of the official version, and the success rate of man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) is up to 1.5% (0.03% of the official version).
User behavior analysis shows that users aged 18-35 account for 82%, and use the platform on average 6.3 times a day (4.1 times for official version users), and the highest usage rate is that of the “chat lock” function (launched on average 2.8 times a day). Research company Gartner recommends that if business users must employ gbwhatsapp in compliance, they should implement a mobile device management (MDM) system (around $7.5 per device per month), which can lower the risk of data leakage from 34% to 9%.