As exposed in the third-party testing company Dr.Fone’s report in 2023, gbwhatsapp is at least compatible with Android 4.1 (API 16), but in reality, the performance of running is very different: On the older phones with 1GB RAM (e.g., Samsung Galaxy S3, Android 4.4.2), the cold launch time is up to 12 seconds (7 seconds for the official WhatsApp), and the peak memory usage rises up to 380MB (220MB for the official WhatsApp), and the possibility of causing a system crash up to 43%. For instance, Indian rural users’ comments indicate that when Redmi Note 3 (Android 5.0, 3GB RAM), released in 2014, ran gbwhatsapp, the video call function made the CPU temperature jump to 48℃ (ambient temperature 30℃), and the crash rate of the application was 27% (9% for the official one).
On the hardware adjustment level, the installation package size of gbwhatsapp is 82MB (45MB for the official one). In low capacity devices of old hardware with the storage capacity ≤16GB (such as Huawei P8 Lite 2015), failure rate during installation would be approximately 18% (available free space should be ≥500MB). Tests carried out by Brazilian digital rights organization Data Privacy Brasil in 2024 revealed that when the “Dynamic Theme” feature was enabled on Android 5.0 devices, the GPU rendering load rose from the baseline of 22% to 58%, and touch response lag from 120ms to 290ms (deviation rate 142%). Apart from this, the incremental backup facility of gbwhatsapp requires support for SQLite version 3.8 and above, while the previous device system’s database version is most commonly 3.5 (accounting for 64%), which gives rise to a backup failure ratio of 37%.
As for legal and security risk, previous devices in most cases cannot be updated to the latest security patches. When gbwhatsapp is utilized, the risk of malware infection is 3.2 times higher than on new devices (Kaspersky statistics in 2024). For instance, in the fraud cases broken by the Indonesian police in 2023, gangs exploited the vulnerability (CVE-2023-1234) of the old version of LG G4 (Android 6.0) with gbwhatsapp to steal users’ SMS verification codes, with the sum involved being 120,000 US dollars. The EU’s “Network and Information Security Directive” (NIS2) specifies that outdated devices undergo EN 303 645 certification. The gbwhatsapp app, nonetheless, was recognized as a “high-risk app” by Germany’s Federal Information Security Agency (BSI) due to it not being adapted for the ARMv7 instruction set (which is the most used instruction set for outdated devices, with a market share of 71%).
User behavior statistics show that approximately 23% of gbwhatsapp users worldwide continue to use Android 7.0 or lower (Statista 2024), of which 58% belong to emerging markets such as Nigeria and Pakistan. Research firm Counterpoint found that users of older devices spend an average of 3.1 hours per day on gbwhatsapp (4.3 hours on new devices), but the failure rate of message sending (16%) and the error rate of media loading (24%) are significantly higher. For example, when sending and receiving homework files using Bangladesh rural teachers’ MOTOROLA Moto G3 (Android 6.0), due to the storage I/O speed limit (eMMC 4.5, read and write speed ≤25MB/s), it can take as long as 4 minutes to send a 1GB file (the new device UFS 3.1 only takes 18 seconds).
Under the category of optimization solutions, disabling “Animation Effects” and “Cloud Backup” of gbwhatsapp reduces memory usage to 280MB (a decrease of 26%) and peak CPU consumption to 24% (standard 38%). The developer group advises using the light version of APK (such as GBWA Lite, whose volume is 58MB), but the missing features’ ratio amounts to 42% (such as ineligibility for use of “incognito mode”). If the device’s Root permission is enabled, the Exynos 4412 processor’s clock frequency (implemented in older phones) can be overclocked from 1.4GHz to 1.6GHz by using overclocking software (such as Kernel Adiutor), and the cold start speed can be lowered to 9 seconds (25% improvement). Battery life decreases by approximately 1.8 hours (tested on a 3000mAh battery). Overall assessment finds that gbwhatsapp is “functional but inefficient” on old phones, and balancing the functional requirements against the risk of hardware wear and tear must be weighed.