771–780 of 1001 posts
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The free version doesn’t show ads. Come on.
They do try to upsell you hard though... 1st party ads are still ads
If this concerns you and you must use WhatsApp, I highly suggest installing it on a separate device only used for WhatsApp, that doesn't have any contacts besides the ones in WhatsApp, which should only have a name and phone number, and registering it with a burner SIM, or from a virtual service. An additional layer of security would be installing it in a Work profile in Android (maybe the new profiles feature works…
Apps should not have free access to all contacts but anything else is currently highly impractical to the point of being unusable. (Android work profile is a good idea, unfortunately that profile is usually take up by… work)
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It's been 11 years. If they hadn't been bought they'd have found a different monetization model long ago
They kinda did. Before facebook brought them, the app cost $1/£1 per year (iirc your first year was free). Thing is back then MMS and/or texts across borders was expensive, so if you were regularly sending picture messages to people the $1/£1 sub was a no brainer. Lets wave a magic wand and presume 50% of the user base thought it was also worth $1 a year and it grew just as well as it did (It was growing very well in…
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Not the OP, but FWIW I'm British and we also called it that in the late 80s.
Don't we still call it that now?
So we should avoid doing this, "Telephone" is a perfectly good name for this idea, and it's not racist. There are lots of small changes we can make, which make the world slightly better for everybody.
> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
Have you considered that you may be making the surface-level analysis? I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app store. They had a staff of ~20 people handling messages across almost 200 countries.It became the defacto global messaging app because it was available on every single platform, not just the Apple/Google duopoly VCs cared about.
> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks. This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
Have you considered that you may be making the surface-level analysis? I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app store. They had a staff of ~20 people handling messages across almost 200 countries.It became the defacto global messaging app because it was available on every single platform, not just the Apple/Google duopoly VCs cared about.
A $3 one-time payment (which I'm guessing is about $2.75 after BlackBerry app store fees) is not sustainable for lifetime access and updates on a service that needs 4-5 nines of service availability and data integrity.
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It is becoming painfully apparent that the cycle of enshittification is truly inevitable, right up there next to the second law of thermodynamics.
Unless it's an open, federated system.
Even if your technical architecture supports scale and federation, these are just some threats off the top of my head:
- spam, fraud and Sybil attacks, deteriorating the experience for everyone
- infighting, forking among maintainers of core libs and protocols
- maintainers get poached by mega corps
- hostile takeovers of foundations, trademarks and auxiliary institutions
- a single entity within federation gets too large and imposes their own changes that can’t be rejected without losing majority of users or forking (see infighting)
- VC/deep-pocket subsidized competition offering free service (say eg video calls) and unlimited marketing, OEM pre-installs etc, to poach critical mass of users
I love the idea of federated systems. But I think some of us nerds think too much about tech and too little about the social and economic dynamics of the real world.
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I guess it feels worth it if you actually like it. I've always hated WhatsApp but use it due to network effect: in my country you pretty much can't have a normal social life without it (and even things like customer service often use it as well). When they started threatening with charging money, it felt like a punch to the gut. So I'm using this product I hate because I'm pretty much forced, as I'd rather be using T…
I think your chronology is wrong. It is extremely unlikely that you used WhatsApp "before they started threatening with charging money" but would have preferred Telegram at the time . Why? 1. Because WhatsApp was a paid app from the beginning ($0.99 after the first year of using it) 2. Because WhatsApp was bought by FB in early 2014, who made it free. 3. Because Telegram was founded in late 2013
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Not the OP, but FWIW I'm British and we also called it that in the late 80s.
Don't we still call it that now?
Words can change meaning a lot in a lifetime. Not too long ago, someone here called me out for saying "transvestite", which was a surprise given one of my favourite comedians called themselves an "executive transvestite": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)
And my mum, when her Alzheimer's was already bad but not quite bad enough she couldn't live in her own home, referred to the cupboard as a "glory hole" — I'd never been aware of meaning #9 until she used it so, "(Scotland and Northern England) A deep built-in cupboard under the eaves or stairs of a house used for general storage, particularly of unrelated or unwanted items stored in some disorder": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glory_hole
Still, could be worse, as I found out when my grandmother used the word "Irish" in the derogatory sense: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Irish#Adjective
Alice Newton-Rex, head of product at WhatsApp: “Alongside of private messaging, people were saying they wanted to hear more about topics, teams and organizations across WhatsApp.” - I am pretty sure NO ONE asked to hear about more topics and organizations across whatsapp.