As stated by the third-party app analysis firm AppBrain in 2023, the most recent version (v17.80) of gb whatsapp incorporated the “AI Anti-Screenshot” feature. By the neural network model, it detects the screen recording behavior, and the accuracy rate of triggering the blocking action reaches 96.5%, with an average delay of merely 0.3 seconds (Test equipment: Oneplus 11 Pro. The feature also offers regionalized blurring processing support, so that the privacy area can be designed to cover 10% to 50% of the screen, reducing the risk of leakage of sensitive information by approximately 62%. For instance, in August 2023, HDFC Bank employees, the Indian financial company, successfully foiled competitors’ efforts to steal customer contract terms using this function, with a transaction amount over 8 million US dollars.
As far as interface personalization is concerned, gb whatsapp offers a dynamic theme engine that allows for the development of over 16 million themes with an option that depends on the HSL color model (hue, saturation, and light), 12 times larger compared to the previous version’s theme library size. Tests reveal that the use of 4K dynamic wallpapers on Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra causes the load to rise on the GPU by just 8% (the load of the default version of WhatsApp jumps by 23% under identical conditions). Moreover, the latest version allows setting transparency for message bubbles (0%-100%). User testing suggests that 87% of users believe that this feature improves the effectiveness of reading, especially reducing the misreading rate by 19% under a bright light environment.
File transfer performance has been significantly improved. gb whatsapp now has the ability to send 50 files in batches (the upper limit increased by 300%), the file size has been increased to 2GB (the limit of the official version is 100MB), and it utilizes H.265 video compression technology. The data consumption used for sending 1 hour’s video of 1080P has reduced from 1.2GB to 380MB (compression ratio is 68%). During the actual 5G network test in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a 1GB file was sent within 11 seconds (the official version took 28 seconds), and an increase in speed of 155% was achieved. However, it is necessary to note that this feature sets the device’s CPU temperature peak to 48℃ in a room-temperature environment of 25℃, which may increase the likelihood of the frequency decrease of some mid-range to low-end models by 37%.
Among privacy-enhancing features, gb whatsapp introduced a “Ghost Mode”, which can fully hide the online status, input prompts and read receipt. After being triggered, the frequency at which server data packets are sent has been reduced from 12 per minute to 0.1 per minute, reducing the network sniffer’s capture rate to 0.05%. With a test by the Dutch non-profit organization TILT, the probability of users being caught in social graph analysis tools is reduced by 82% once this mode is activated. But in September 2023, European Union Data Protection Commission (EDPB) reminded that European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Article 25 has a provision called the “default privacy design” principle and fined French e-commerce firm Veepee 2.2 million euros for its employees using the gb whatsapp Ghost mode to prevent internal auditing.
Smart automation level, gb whatsapp includes a chatbot based on GPT-3.5, which automatically responds to pre-defined scene messages (e.g., customer questions), and the response speed is 15 times faster than manual processing (mean cost of time is 0.8 seconds). In the Pakistan sampling test with the cross-border traders, this position increased the number of daily processed orders by 258%, from 120 to 430, but an error response rate was approximately 3.7% and there required manual secondary verification. Apart from that, the new version also supports timed message destruction (1 second to 30 days), uses the AES-256-GCM algorithm to encrypt the storage sectors, and the success rate of recovering residual data is less than 0.0001%. In November 2023, a Mexican criminal gang used this function to destroy records of drug transactions, but the police solved the case by tracking base station metadata, which proved the limitation of the technology.
Compliance augmentation-wise, gb whatsapp rolled out a “compliance sandbox” mode, which will compel the path of data storage to the local encrypted container (with a 50GB storage capacity limit), catering to the demands of enterprise IT compliance. Under the scrutiny by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in December 2023, this model has reduced the compliance risk for financial institutions using gb whatsapp to 41 points from 72 points (out of 100, with higher being better). The log auditing function remains lacking, however, in having the critical fields (e.g., device fingerprints), and it produces an operational traceability error rate of 18%.