WhatsApp is a pretty easy app to get. It is on all platforms from smartphone operating systems to the rudimentary operating systems you find on feature phones.
However you still find weird forks of WhatsApp everywhere and one of the popular ones is called GBWhatsApp. Well it seems WhatsApp is not too happy about this as people have noticed that WhatsApp is banning the popular fork.
The notice reads: You’re temporarily banned from WhatsApp because you may have violated our terms of service. The message was then followed by a ticker that displayed how long WhatsApp will ban you, where in this case, this guy was banned for over 9 hours!
If you check WhatsApp’s Terms of Service, you can see the multiple places where GB WhatsApp has violated their terms.
Under ‘Whatsapp Rights’, it says: We own copyrights, trademarks, domains, logos, trade dress, trade secrets, patents and other intellectual property rights associated with our Services. You may not use our copyrights, trademarks, domains, logos, trade dress, patents, and other intellectual property rights unless you have our express permission and except in accordance with our Brand Guidelines.
This could be the reason why WhatsApp is temporarily banning users from using GBWhatsApp. The move to ban users from using Whatsapp GB could also be a passive aggressive move by Whatsapp to discourage people from using GBWhatsApp and use the official app instead.
There are a lot of WhatsApp forks out there and we have to see whether this is a start of a trend by WhatsApp to kill them off one by one.