According to third-party app comparison tool AppBrain in 2023, gbwhatsapp and WhatsApp Plus significantly vary in privacy functions: The former provides “deep incognito mode” (hiding of online status, input prompts and read receipts, with a 98% success rate), while the latter simply blocks read receipts (with an 87% success rate). For instance, experiments conducted by the Indian e-commerce retailer Flipkart identified that employees utilizing gbwhatsapp saw a 24% improvement in their mean daily processing capacity by avoiding leakages of customers’ push messages for orders, whereas the rate of complaints on WhatsApp Plus rose by 13% due to input prompts leakages. Technically, gbwhatsapp has modified the ViewRootImpl class of Android to intercept drawing commands (adding 12,000 lines of code), and the package size of the installation has been 82MB (WhatsApp Plus is 76MB). The cold start time is 0.7 seconds longer (measured by Samsung Galaxy S23).
From a theme personalized feature point of view, gbwhatsapp supports over 80,000 themes (average 1.5 million daily downloads) and includes HSL dynamic color grading (hue accuracy ±0.5%), whereas WhatsApp Plus only supports up to 6,000 static themes (taking 0.3 seconds longer to load). For instance, the “Neon Dark” theme of gbwhatsapp has been used by these Indonesian social media influencers, the fan engagement rate surged by 18%. But since the ad SDK was placed in the theme file (15% detection rate), the user complaint rate increased by 45%. For the cases of fraud busted by the Brazilian police in 2023, the criminals used the “false location” feature of WhatsApp Plus (range of error ±500 meters) in order to prevent tracking. But due to the more accurate location deception algorithm of gbwhatsapp (with ±50 meters error rate), the case-solving rate was 22% higher.
In terms of security threats, gbwhatsapp has a 1.5% success rate in man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) due to end-to-end encryption protocol tampering (with a 72% coverage rate), while WhatsApp Plus has a success rate of 0.9%. EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance report states that in 2024, Germany’s Hamburg Data Protection Authority fined companies using gbwhatsapp for 120,000 euros (including the release of 24,000 sets of medical information), while WhatsApp Plus was fined for more thanRetention of metadata (average of 90 days). It was fined by French CNIL 80,000 euros (GDPR requirement ≤30 days). Experiments by the cybersecurity firm ESET indicate that the percentage of unencrypted backup files for gbwhatsapp is 68% (54% for WhatsApp Plus), and the malware theft risk is 26% greater.
Based on user population and market coverage, gbwhatsapp enjoys a market penetration of 35% among emerging markets like Nigeria and Pakistan (72% of users are between the ages of 18-34), while average daily usage time stands at 4.3 hours (3.8 hours for WhatsApp Plus). According to Statista’s 2024 statistics, WhatsApp has 270 million monthly active users worldwide (an 8% year-over-year growth), whereas WhatsApp Plus has suffered a 12% year-over-year decline in user churn rate due to slow feature development. For instance, Indian IT company Wipro does not allow the use of WhatsApp Plus (whose risk of non-compliance is 72/100), but allows for partial use of gbwhatsapp (whose score is 58/100) as it has sandbox isolation (its rate of data leakage dropped to 6%).
From the point of view of performance impact, when gbwhatsapp is run on Mediatek Dimensity 9200 phones, CPU usage reaches as high as 38% (32% for WhatsApp Plus) and the temperature reaches as high as 44℃ (room temperature 25℃). Following the activation of the “Message Scheduled Destruction” feature, the failure rate in gbwhatsapp media file recovery was 7.3% (5.1% for WhatsApp Plus), but the erasure speed of encryption was greater (1 second/thousand messages vs. 1.5 seconds). Counterpoint research firm advises that if there is a need for both security and functionality, gbwhatsapp is more appropriate for high-risk tolerant users, while WhatsApp Plus is designed for basic privacy needs scenarios.