As of third-party app review website Android Authority’s test data, as of 2023, gb whatsapp allows up to 50 pinning of chats (official WhatsApp has a limit of 3), and allows the setting of how long pinning lasts (1 hour to indefinite). The reaction time of the operation is just 0.3 seconds (Test device: OnePlus 11 Pro). For example, in 2023, the customer service division of India’s e-commerce leader Flipkart leveraged this capability to head overtop conversations involving high-frequency customers, which resulted in the improvement of the average daily processing effectiveness by 28% (120 orders per person to 154 orders per person). Technically, gb whatsapp enlarged the package to 82MB (45MB for official one) through resizing the SQLite database index of chat list (by adding is_pinned field) and inserting about 1200 lines of high-priority logic code.
Insofar as privacy and security are in issue, pinned records of gb whatsapp are stored within an unencrypted local database (path:) / data/data/com. Gbwhatsapp/databases/chat_pinning db, February 2024, the Internet security firm Trend Micro’s report points out that the chances of such data are malware to steal 14% (the official version using encrypted storage, The chances are 0.2%. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union requires that the period of retention of metadata must not exceed 30 days. However, the defaulted pinned operation logs of gb whatsapp such as pinned time and user ID are stored for 90 days, and there is a fine of 90,000 euros by Germany’s Hamburg Data Protection Authority in May 2024 on a logistics company. There are 13,000 violation records.
User behavior analysis indicates that among the 18-35 year olds, users of gb whatsapp use the pinned feature with an average of 3.2 a day (0.8 for the official users), where among these instances 67% are business-related. Market research firm Counterpoint found that when the “dynamic pinning” (automatically changing depending on frequency of messages) feature was turned on, the percentage of missing reading important messages fell from 12% to 4%, but the likelihood of accidentally pinning spam messages increased to 9% (due to training data bias of algorithms). For instance, in the case of fraud cracked by the police in Sao Paulo, Brazil in November 2023, the hackers utilized the top-pinning functionality of gb whatsapp to attack their victims. However, as their IP addresses had been associated with the records of the top-pinning operation, they were subsequently traced and discovered, reducing the time of solving the case by 37%.
Performance impact-wise, when gb whatsapp pinned 50 chats simultaneously on Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, the highest memory usage reached 520MB (280MB when the official version pinned 3 chats), and app cold start time went up by 1.2 seconds (from 2.1 seconds to 3.3 seconds). When the user enables the “Top Synchronization” mode (synchronizing the top status on multiple devices), hourly data usage goes up to 4.7MB (unofficial version is not supported in this mode), and as the server will never enable end-to-end encryption, the risk of data tampering is 7 times higher compared to the official version.
In the compliance solution, business users can limit the usage scope of the pinned feature of gb whatsapp with MDM (Mobile Device Management) tools (such as Microsoft Intune), increasing the capture rate of violation operation logs to 98%, but the deployment cost is approximately $5.6 per device per month. For individual users who need to improve their experience, it is recommended to purge the pinned records from time to time (for instance, by resetting them every 7 days), which can reduce memory usage to an average of 380MB (decreased by 27%) and reduce the likelihood of data leak to 3.4% (as tested by Norton in 2024).