The launch upends its founders’ original mission of creating an app with ‘No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!’ This week, WhatsApp did something its founders said it would never do: it’s putting advertisements inside the app. It ends WhatsApp’s decade-plus run of offering an ad-free messaging and calling experience.

WhatsApp has announced that it’s adding ads to the popular messaging app, though the initial implementation promises to be relatively restrained. In a recent Meta blog post, the company revealed that it was adding adverts to the app’s Updates tab.

WhatsApp recently confirmed that advertising is gradually rolling out to a significant portion of its users. According to a new help page, people using the app