According to the 2023 third-party app market report, gbwhatsapp, which is a hacked version of WhatsApp, boasts more than 10 million active users worldwide but its account compatibility is extremely contentious. According to official statistics of Meta, the original WhatsApp app has 2 billion monthly active users, and gbwhatsapp has been removed from the Google Play Store several times for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and users are at a 30% privacy violation risk while porting accounts. For example, in 2022, Meta’s security team had blocked 5 million accounts through unofficial clients, approximately 65% of which were gbwhatsapp, mainly due to the unencrypted API interface that caused chat logs to be intercepted by third parties.
At the technical level, gbwhatsapp modified the WhatsApp protocol through reverse engineering to support single-account multi-device login (up to 5 units), but the message synchronization failure rate was up to 18%, much higher than the 2% of native apps. Appinventiv research institute test findings demonstrate gbwhatsapp’s auto-response speed is 0.8 seconds (native app’s is 0.3 seconds), while memory consumption increases by 40% (avg 320MB), implying low-end phones (such as 2GB RAM phones) stalling likelihood increases by 25%. Additionally, its personalized theme feature includes 2,000 templates but has 70% with code vulnerabilities that can potentially cause system security warnings.
On a compliance basis, gbwhatsapp users are legally at risk. On the ban of 59 Chinese apps in 2021, the gbwhatsapp was placed on the watch list for cross-border data transfer issues, and user session content was cached in unauthenticated servers (e.g., Alibaba Cloud node in Mumbai), which violated Article 43A of the Indian Information Technology Act. In a similar case, the European Court of Justice fined a German user 500 euros in 2023 for sending commercial messages via gbwhatsapp that resulted in the forwarding of customer information to unauthorized third parties.
On StatCounter, gbwhatsapp holds 12% market share in Southeast Asia, but the year-over-year user churn rate has increased by 45%, primarily due to slower feature updates (14 days behind the official release) and compatibility issues. For instance, WhatsApp’s 2023 brought “channels” feature with only 60% adoption on gbwhatsapp, and the message loading error rate went up to 22%. Additionally, the file transfer mode increases the limit to 100MB (16MB in native applications), but the transfer rate is only 78% and the consumption of power increases by 30%.
Even though gbwhatsapp offers options for personalization (e.g., hide status when online, and extend delay for withdrawal up to 48 hours), Kaspersky Lab security company identified 14 significant vulnerabilities (CVSS score ≥7.5) in its codebase that can be abused to gain remote control over the devices or for stealing two-factor authentication (2FA) tokens. In a 2023 case of cyber fraud in Brazil, attackers misused the weakness of gbwhatsapp to batch clone accounts to the tune of 2,000 users, who lost more than $500,000.
Briefly, although gbwhatsapp attracts certain functional extension users, its security risks, legal threats and technical instability significantly raise the cost of migrating from native WhatsApp accounts, and users are suggested to choose official authentication services preferentially to prevent potential losses.