About Vobo

1. Why this site exists

Roughly three billion people use WhatsApp and almost none of them were given a manual. The app hides most of what it is doing. It shows you one tick without saying what a second tick would mean. It says “online” without saying what that proves. It asks for your phone number without explaining that the number is the account, which turns out to be the single most consequential fact about it.

The official help centre is accurate and close to unreadable. It is organised around features rather than around questions, it answers in the passive voice, and it will not tell you when a widely believed thing is simply false. Meanwhile most of what search returns is worse: rewritten from the same three sources, padded to hit a word count, and often wrong in ways that are confidently stated.

We started Vobo because the gap between those two things is enormous, and because a straight answer is not actually hard to write — it is just rarely anyone’s incentive.

2. What we do

Every article opens with a direct answer in the first two or three sentences, because that is usually all anybody wanted. The rest of the page is there because the short answer tends to raise another question — “can people see my phone number” becomes “then what can I actually hide?” within about ten seconds — and we would rather answer that on the same page than send you back to search.

• Answer first. No preamble, no history of instant messaging, no three paragraphs about how we all communicate differently now.
• Steps where the task is practical, a table where two things need comparing, and a diagram only where a picture beats a sentence.
• Named sources. Every article ends with the primary sources it rests on, each with a line saying what it supports — not a decorative bibliography.
• Plain-text versions. Every article is also served as Markdown at /its-slug.md, for people and machines that would rather read it that way.

3. Where we say “you cannot know”

There are several questions on this site where the truthful answer is that you cannot tell from the outside. Whether someone has blocked you. Whether a grey placeholder means no photo or no access. Whether a single tick means their phone is off or that you have been cut off. WhatsApp deliberately makes those states indistinguishable, and that ambiguity is a safety feature for the person doing the blocking.

Most pages covering those questions invent a test anyway, because “here are five ways to tell” performs better than “there is no way to tell”. We say there is no way to tell. It is less satisfying and it is what is true, and being independent is exactly what lets us write it.

4. Independent of WhatsApp and Meta

Vobo has no relationship of any kind with WhatsApp LLC or Meta Platforms, Inc. We are not affiliated with them, endorsed by them, sponsored by them or paid by them.

That independence is the point. It means we can say plainly when a feature does not do what people assume, when a claim repeated across the internet is wrong, and when the honest answer is that nobody outside the company knows. It also means we have no access to your account and cannot recover, unblock or restore anything for you — see our disclaimer, which is blunt about this because people are defrauded by others who claim otherwise.

5. How articles are researched

Our full method, including how we handle corrections and what we do when sources disagree, is on the editorial policy page. In short:

• We start from WhatsApp's own documentation, and check it against the current app rather than assuming the documentation is up to date.
• We prefer primary sources — official help pages, the published cryptographic literature, regulators — over other people's articles.
• We date every article, and we say when behaviour differs between iOS, Android and regions.
• We deliberately avoid printing figures that go stale quietly, such as minimum supported OS versions. A confidently wrong number is worse than none.
• Where we are inferring rather than citing, we say so in the text instead of dressing an opinion up as a statistic.

6. Who writes it

Vobo is written and maintained by Robert Mical. He started it after watching somebody spend two days convinced they had been blocked when the other person’s phone had simply been switched off — a mistake four separate articles had actively encouraged. The longer version, including how he researches a page and what he refuses to claim to know, is on his page.

Nobody here has worked at WhatsApp or Meta, and we do not pretend otherwise. The expertise on offer is the practical kind: being the person other people call when something on their phone stops behaving, and then checking the answer properly rather than repeating it.

7. How the site is paid for

The site is supported by advertising. That pays for hosting and for the time the writing takes, and it is why we can keep everything free to read. Advertisements are visually distinct from editorial content, and no advertiser has any influence over what we write or which conclusions we reach. How the advertising and analytics work, and what data they involve, is set out in full in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

8. What we promise

• Free to read. No paywall, no registration, no “subscribe to continue”.
• Fast and quiet. No pop-ups, no interstitials, no autoplay, no cookie wall in front of an answer.
• Corrected. Tell us something is wrong and we will check it. If you are right, we fix it and the article’s updated date changes.
• Honest about limits. Where the answer is “nobody can know that”, we will say so rather than sell you a trick that does not work.

9. Get in touch

A correction, a question we have not covered, or a request to reuse something? Our contact page explains what goes where, or you can simply write to us: