It looks like WhatsApp might finally break out of users’ smartphones and head to their desktop.
The Facebook-owned company hasn’t announced anything officially yet, but the cat was let out of the bag by Pavel Durov, the head of Telegram, a WhatsApp clone that has over 50 million monthly active users.
In an interview to TechCrunch, Durov said that he thinks WhatsApp will launch a Web version — just like Telegram and other competing services like Line, Viber and WeChat — that will allow users to pick up conversations from their phones in their web browsers.
“They tried to hire our web dev,” Durov also said in his TechCrunch interview, giving further credence to the rumors.
On phones, WhatsApp uses users’ phone number to authenticate them when they set it up for the first time.
On the Web, it’s likely that it will sign users in the same way. Presuming there’s a WhatsApp desktop app or a Web app that they could sign in to in their browser, WhatsApp could send a code to their phone to verify their identity and seamlessly sync their conversations between their phone and computer. Apple’s iMessage service, for instance, works in a similar fashion.
WhatsApp eyes its desktop version



