WhatsApp: We’re Not Selling to Google

Popular messaging app WhatsApp says it is not in discussions to sell the company to Google.

Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp’s business development head, told AllThingsD today that the company is not holding sales talks with Google.

Earlier this week, a single-source report from Digital Trends said that the company was contemplating a $1 billion sale to the search giant.

Arora declined to comment further.

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum speaks at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York next week (this is one of the sessions that’s being livestreamed; more details on that soon).

WhatsApp has been the subject of similar rumors before, but with Facebook as the rumored buyer in December. At the time, the company said the reports were “not factually accurate.”

WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world, with a very simple formula of cross-platform messaging (mostly text, but also photo, video, audio and location sharing). The app costs 99 cents on iOS and, in some countries, the service costs 99 cents per year on Android.