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by iraphael 3844 days ago
Apparently, Whatsapp is only end-to-end encrypted on Android, where it uses TextSecure. On iOS, it still uses RC4.
2 comments

Do you have a cite for this?

Signal (née TextSecure) runs on Android and iOS, with an in-development Chrome extension (or whatever) to run where Chrome runs.

The initial announcement of the partnership between WhatsApp and TextSecure ( https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/ ) states that it was only for the Android WhatsApp client, and I'm unable to find an update saying that it has been added to the iOS client.
Oh. Thanks for digging that up.

This quote from the post really stands out to me:

"WhatsApp runs on an incredible number of mobile platforms, so full deployment will be an incremental process as we add TextSecure protocol support into each WhatsApp client platform. We have a ways to go until all mobile platforms are fully supported, but we are moving quickly towards a world where all WhatsApp users will get end-to-end encryption by default."

It seems... unlikely that the crypto integration would be left half-done. I guess I could find a Whatsapp user with an iDevice and another with an Android device and look at the software UI for clues. :D

You are probably correct. They adopted TextSecure on Android near the end of 2014, but I'm not sure of the state of iOS.