WhatsApp is known to be the world’s most used chat app, boasting a user base of over a billion people. It is hard to miss this app on almost every phone, be it Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or even the forgotten Nokia Symbian.
What makes WhatsApp such a popular chat app is the of range features it comes with. For starters, the app is very simple and easy to download, install as well as use. In addition, the app is totally free of charge and you only need an internet connection to use it. Speaking of using it, the app is meant for exchanging texts, photos, videos, documents and as well as make free voice calls to other people using the app.
Interestingly, this Facebook-owned app has an equal and even better match in the shape of WhatsApp Plus. This app is hot on the official app’s heels thanks to its tons of modifications. An app that started showing up in 2012, it has undergone quite a lot, including being banned from the official Google Play Store for violation of copyright as well as banning any WhatsApp accounts associated with it for periods of 24 hours and some for 72 hours. The good side of the story is that the Spanish developer behind the app – Rafalete – never gave up. A new version of WhatsApp Plus, which is ban-free, was unveiled later on, but one will be wondering what really the difference between these two apps is.
The basics
To start with, WhatsApp Plus and WhatsApp make use of the same phone number. It is possible to switch from WhatsApp to the modified WhatsApp Plus and still keep your messages from the standard version. However, the most obvious difference (apart from the name) between WhatsApp and WhatsApp Plus stems from the fact that they have two very different icon colors. The standard WhatsApp has a blue icon while the modified WhatsApp Plus has a blue icon. Digging deeper, you will find out that there are even more functional differences between these chat apps.
The visual differences between these two apps will tell you that they are worlds apart. Of course, you will still find some cool visual displays, styles as well as themes on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp, however, everything gets to the next level when WhatsApp Plus comes into play. The Rafalete-owned app has more than 700 themes that users can choose from. In addition, these themes can easily be sorted out with respect to their date of creation, the number of downloads, name as well as version.
With these themes, WhatsApp Plus users can change just about everything on this app, be it the background, text colors, sizes, font types, colors, and sizes as well, among other things. These are features you won’t find on the green-themed WhatsApp.
WhatsApp Plus gets even better when you start using it. Users can make use of a wide array of emoticons, both from WhatsApp and Google Hangouts, but there is a catch. The catch here is that for these emoticons to work, the recipient must also be using the modified version, otherwise, they will show up as question marks.
WhatsApp has been “copying” some features from WhatsApp Plus, for instance, the ability to hide last seen status, blue ticks and other privacy settings. However, the original app has so far been unable to emulate the clone app’s ability to send media files that are more than the 16MB provided on the former. WhatsApp Plus users can easily exchange audio and video files of up to 50MB in size. In short, you will receive images and videos that of the same quality as the sender’s, which is contrary to WhatsApp, where these files are compressed in order to fit the 16MB limit, thus losing some quality.
The addition of the “Plus” tag on the name of this app simply means that WhatsApp Plus can do more than what the standard WhatsApp does. However, most of these features will only be enjoyable if both the sender and recipient are using the modified app.
If you ask me, WhatsApp has been copying all the features they introduced lately — not only from WhatsApp Plus, also from Threema and Telegram. But they always take their time. Next year, they’ll probably introduce bots. 😉