Published At
July 6, 2020
In theory, being end-to-end encrypted basically means they don't need servers, but they do to route the messages to the correct device. To use push notifications to send messages (or more likely trigger message fetching in the background) and store (encrypted) messages whilst the recipient is offline.
I wonder if the original WhatsApp team ever prototyped ditching servers entirely & just started having phones peer-to-peer send?