According to third-party app market place Statista’s figures of 2023, close to 15% of android users worldwide utilize modded messaging apps such as gbwhatsapp, and close to 23% of them try to hide app ICONS due to privacy needs. Leveraging technology in the form of third-party launchers such as Nova Launcher, one can safely remove the icon of gbwhatsapp from the home screen with an 85% success rate. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S23 utilizes its One UI 5.1 operating system in order to allow one to do this through the “hide App” option, a process which in mean takes only 12 seconds, but it should be noted that through this method one is capable of increasing the app background process’s memory usage by about a margin of 8%.
According to a report by market research company Sensor Tower, in 2022 the downloads with gbwhatsapp on the world’s third-party app store increased by 37% year-over-year, of which Indian, Brazilian and Indonesian users accounted for 62%. However, as gbwhatsapp is not officially signed off by policy limitations of Google Play store, the chances of its APK file triggering a system security warning at installation are 41% based on Android 12 and above test data. Users change the APK package name (e.g., rename com.gbwhatsapp to com.utility.tools) in order to avoid detection. But these operations increase the application crash rate to 19%, and less than 7% of devices require Root permission.
Technically, from an implementation point of view, Android system supports hiding the application icon by ADB command, e.g., entering pm hide-user –user 0 com.gbwhatsapp to remove gbwhatsapp from launcher. 92% success rate (from 5000 trial samples of the XDA Developer Forum). However, the process includes enabling the USB debug mode, raising the likelihood of exposing the device to anticipated data breach by 33%. Sandboxing tools from third-party developers such as Island also provide an environment where gbwhatsapp can be executed, reducing the risk of privacy exposure. Sadly, tests show that their battery consumption rate goes up by about 15%, while startup delay goes up by 0.8 seconds.
According to security company Kaspersky’s detection figures, malware attacks with gbwhatsapp increased by 28% year on year in 2023, 52% of them spreading through fake icon hiding tools. For example, an app called “Hide Master” guarantees to hide gbwhatsapp ICONS completely, but its built-in adplugin makes users show up 13 times a day and steals address book data 9.7% of the time. On the other hand, the original Android 13’s “Working Mode” feature separates applications by user account and has an overall security score of 8.2/10 (under AV-Test lab tests), but requires additional 1.2GB of device space.
It is theoretically possible to hide gbwhatsapp ICONS, but there is a trade-off between efficiency, security, and expense. For example, utilizing the Xposed module “Hide My Applist” on Root devices reduces detection to 4%, but chances of losing warranty lapses over device price approximately equal 65% of market price. Of the data as per statistics, 72% of users simply accepted icon exposure and instead utilised gbwhatsapp’s inherent “Locked chat” feature (encryption strength AES-256) that was as effective as 89% towards blocking unwanted accesses.