I remember reading in some Brian Acton interview that Facebook leadership believes that ads would bring in more money than charging businesses for access, integrations and premium features.
Living in a country where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, I really don't understand that. Is it just a lack of imagination on Facebook's part? Companies, from tiny ones all the way up to enterprises, will pay serious money to be able support customers over WhatsApp in an effective way. And then I've not even begun to consider the marketing channel WhatsApp could be (also without turning into a spam hotbed).
Facebook is the gatekeeper to WhatsApp, effectively a monopoly to a piece of core telecom infrastructure for a lot of countries. They could squeeze this out to the max.
Right now, they give all of this away for nearly free and share the profit with the likes of MessageBird and Twilio. TBH i'd prefer they tax businesses than my eyeballs.
> I remember reading in some Brian Acton interview that Facebook leadership believes that ads would bring in more money than charging businesses for access, integrations and premium features.
Verbatim: it wouldn't scale.
Acton said he tried to push Facebook towards an alternative, less privacy hostile business model for WhatsApp — suggesting a metered-user model such as by charging a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up.
But that “very simple business” idea was rejected outright by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who he said told him “it won’t scale”.
“I called her out one time,” Acton also told Forbes. “I was like, ‘No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money as…,’ and she kind of hemmed and hawed a little.
It looks like to me that the multi-billion dollar company that Facebook is, with all the very intelligent people working there, is a one pony trick that only knows how to make money by putting ads everywhere.
The problem with charging (any amount) is network effects. When the value of a service depends on other users using it, anything that limits user numbers is a no-go.
The reason the business rationale for WhatsApp (and lots of other digital services) is so wired is because the normal dynamics is supply and demand don't apply.
In a "normal" market, the cost of providing a service and revenue tend to be similar... because companies compete on price.
The revenue potential of WhatsApp is completely unrelated to the cost of inventing or running WhatsApp. The revenue potential has nothing to do with the value to customers. Weird inputs, weird outputs.
You make it sound like Facebook doesn't know how. Of course they do.
It's just that ads is significantly more profitable than having to run sales teams in the 200 odd countries around the world. Especially since ads is largely self service even down to ML models monitoring abuse.
Also, fb already have an ad business. They don't have a b2b software business. If Salesforce had bought WhatsApp, they might be interested in the b2b idea. They probably wouldn't be into the advertising idea.
Keep in mind that Facebook's existing ad business is 100% B2B as well and they don't use an is school Oracle/IBM/Yellowpages sales org for that. Selling API access to WhatsApp would not necessarily have to be different.
Facebook already having an ad business can also be used as a counter-argument: cannibalization. Some of the ad-spending going to WhatsApp would definitely be spent on Facebook instead if WhatsApp remained ad-free. But I can't imagine that they are not fully aware of this (even Hanlon's razer must have limits somewhere), so what remains is that they consider the expansion of addressable ad audience more valuable than other monetization strategies plus the massive hit the WhatsApp brand will take from ad introduction. And because those ads would be almost worthless without the targeting ad customers expect from the Facebook brand, the whole thing is like an indirect confession about the existence and quality of shadow profiles describing those who are not registered with the mothership. Well, that group is about to shrink...
The B2C and B2B parts won't need sales teams all over the world.
E.g. A certain telecom api provider doesn't need sales teams all over the world. In fact I've never seen any ads or anything about them locally, but guess who's on top of my mind when I need to send or receive sms in some other country?
You are right, that was a bit harsh and ignored the profitability angle. However I think this shows that FB isn't an innovative company (à la spaceX, MS, biotech, etch.) and yet are perceived that way.
That's exactly it, Facebook is an advertising business and they struggle to think that they would be better and other ways to monetize a product, especially on WhatsApp where you have entire countries using it.
I think the real reason FB went public even though zuck “didn’t really want to” is so they could hide behind shareholder value as their excuse for everything. Public companies don’t go public to innovate, they go public to make everyone money. This is the model currently destroying America.
More likely for the same reason Google went public; when above some size, US companies have essentially all the reporting and disclosure requirements of a public company.
When companies reach that stage, the rational thing to do is .. go public, so you’d also get the benefits (share liquidity and ability to raise money publicly)
This is a new restructuring from 2015 IIRC. It was Google inc that went public, and originally all the projects (including self driving car) were under google.
Alphabet was created later, together with splitting Wayne and a few others.
I don’t remember all the different triggers, and each triggers a different reporting requirement - more than 500 shareholders, more than $X billion paid to suppliers, stuff like that. Google, and later Facebook met all of them.
I wasn’t aware of that, good point. I’m sure either way the “shareholder value” gimmick is still a viable excuse for FB making these kinds of decisions.
There are many thing you could do with it, but I don't think Facebook is really interested in developing it as its own business. They probably just want to incorporate it into their own machine.
I would stop using Whatsapp if they introduced ads. Most of my immediate network would to. Ads in non-chat apps is undesirable by acceptable. Chat is where I go for a very specific use case. Ads would piss my off incredibly. I don't want my attention hijacked in the app I use for personal and direct communication.
Business Chat (for iMessage) does exactly this, though I haven't actually interacted with a company this way yet, so I can't say how good of an experience it is.
When Netflix a few months ago prompted me with "Hey your number is a Whatsapp account, do mind if we send notifications via Whatsapp?" I was generally horrified.
It felt a serious transgression of my privacy. Though in hindsight I realised it was an easy task, I can, after all, see if people are using Whatsapp if I have their number so there is little to stop companies doing the same lookup if they have my number.
But it felt very uncomfortable.
I don't want companies involved with my Whatsapp, it is exclusively for messaging my missus, and group chats with friends and family. Nothing else.
I did read somewhere that one of the founders said the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".
I am dreading what the ad monetisation will be like. Since everyone I am friends with, related to or worked with use Whatsapp, their market penetration is ubiquitous here in my London ecosphere. Hope they don't ruin that.
Whatsapp specifically though, it is just your phone number. You don't have that control over your phone number. Seems a little harsh to hold that one company to higher standards than literally anything else with your number.
Direct marketing rules should still apply, in the UK you can't legally cold-call mobile numbers.
I mean, I get it I agree with you and use whatsapp the same way. The one time I tried to use it to message for a takeaway they just ignored the order.
To be fair to Netflix it was a polite question banner at the top of the screen. Though fairly large and in your face. They did re-prompt a few times, but I have not seen it for a while now.
But it caught me off guard as I was not expecting it. And did not welcome it.
I wonder what the stats are for their members' responses. Maybe was just an A-B test.
I get that banner. I don't have WhatsApp and have never used it.
The container Netflix is inside doesn't know anything about me other than my Netflix account. Presumably they've decided that annoying paying customers is a good idea.
"An SMS has just come in from his local Honda dealer saying “payment received.” He points to it on his phone.
“This is what I wanted people to do with WhatsApp,” he says of the world’s biggest messaging service, which is used by more than 1.5 billion people and provides ad-free, encrypted messaging as a core feature. “This was informational, and useful.""
"
"Acton had proposed monetizing WhatsApp through a metered-user model, charging, say, a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up. “You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country,” Acton says. “You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business.”
Acton’s plan was shot down by Sandberg. “Her words were ‘It won’t scale.’ ”"
"An SMS has just come in from his local Honda dealer saying “payment received.” He points to it on his phone.
Forgive my skepticism, but this sounds fake to me. Unless there are countries where you local auto dealer finances your car. Everywhere I've lived, financing goes through a bank or the manufacturer's bank/bank partner (GMAC, etc...).
> the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".
When Facebook opened themselves up to everyone instead of College students, I felt the same way. When FB opened up to companies, I cancelled my account.
In the end it didn't matter. Companies were creating FB accounts anyway. Curbing them to a more explicit form of corporateship was the right thing to do than let them masquerade as users.
Internationally, WhatsApp is a very large force in both friendly communications and corporate/public/commercial avenues to communicate. Creating a WhatsApp business account (payable) to communicate with customers is the right thing to do. And I would not mind it as long as it is behind a portal and filter.
> There’s no one there I can’t get on Facebook, Instagram or signal.
I'm actually waiting for FB/Whatsapp to announce it's specific monetization strategy so that it becomes the trigger to tell my friends/family on WhatsApp off of it and onto Signal. Otherwise, you're correct, it's very difficult to convince people otherwise.
Actually Signal (and 95% of the Android app ecosystem) works almost perfectly with microg in place of Google Play Services. Using microg to use Signal does require that you allow Signal to connect to Google's "cloud messaging" push notification infrastructure, but in addition to Signal not actually sending any content through this infrastructure (as mentioned by the sibling poster), it apparently replaces all the data that is normally hoovered up by Google Play Services and attached to the requests sent using that infrastructure, so that you are sending almost nothing. I should emphasize I'm just regurgitating the claims made by microg developers, and I haven't done any research into the truthiness of these claims. But I will say that microg is hyper-focused on privacy (perhaps obviously), and this is an important issue to the entire userbase, and these kinds of things can't be done inadvertently or by default. The microg backend is extremely explicit with plenty of warnings indicating what it's doing and when and most importantly, giving you an opportunity to cancel the action after you've initiated it, but prior to it being executed.
Why is that a deal breaker for you? AFAIK, Signal only uses GCM to send notifications to wake the app. No data is sent over GCM. What messaging platform you use to avoid GCM?
I still remember the first installation of WhatsApp messenger on an old Samsung device of mine in 2012 as a high-schooler. It was incredibly liberating to finally discover an IM app that enabled me to send unlimited messages to my friends and not get hamstrung by SMS limits that existed in my country; especially one that was resource-light enough to run on my device's 866 MHz processor.
I'd largely glossed over Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp back in '14 as just another big tech company eating up a smaller 'potential future competitor,' but in hindsight it looks like it was the beginning of the end of WhatsApp as a simple, reliable and ad-free private messenger.
Super glad I quit the platform in 2017 -- never been more tranquil.
What? If anything, WhatsApp has become a better product since its acquisition. It is currently the simplest, most reliable, ad-free messenger out there, which also supports state of the art end-to-end encryption for its millions of users.
Let's see how they deploy ads. But it would be a shame that WhatsApp shut downs because Facebook cannot monetize the application. If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.
> Let's see how they deploy ads. ... If anything, I'm glad they're going this route instead of charging a fee to use the app.
I understand why you hold this view but woe I wish it to be that more people agreed with me and held the opposite. I wish we were fine with paying money instead of "being monetized" and having ads shoved in front of us.
I don't want to see how they deploy the ads; I don't want ads, period. By their very nature, ads are a guarantee that I'm going to be tracked, sliced, analyzed, deanonymized, and attention-grabbed any time I crack open that app. I guess I'm turning more and more into the Luddite but I am tired of the ads, tired of the continual chase for my ever-decreasing number of seconds on this planet.
I don't even know that letting me pay to not have ads is a) practical (because what's to say the ads aren't being shown in a "hidden" way such that I am still tracked and followed) or b) fair (because what about the other billions of people on the planet for whom money can't be traded for time as they have more of the latter than the former yet still don't deserve to be tracked). But I still don't like ads.
You already pay money for your mobile subscription. The whole point of WhatsApp is free messaging, if it stops being free, there is no point in having it.
Ads are a slippery slope. It might begin with text-only ads in 'Status' but I think it's only a matter of time before they spill over into other, more private sections of the application.
And I do not trust Facebook Inc. to put privacy over profits [0] given it's trashy record in this space.
End-to-end encryption is a valid point, but WhatsApp was not the first to pioneer it. Scale-wise it just got lucky, and Facebook just threw in a bunch of dollars from its coffers to acquire all that.
According to that article WhatsApp provided almost no data except who was in the group and who was sending messages. There is no way Signal can function without having the same data available.
Signal was once subpoenaed by the FBI to give up all stored data/metadata relating to a certain account. They responded with the account creation timestamp and the last-connected timestamp, suggesting that they do not store information about group ownerships or contacts.
Interestingly this is also what the Signal libraries implement. So applications making use of them will generally make use of this optimization.
For some reason, the Signal application itself was not making use of this optimization. My guess is that it had not updated its code yet when I looked. This might have changed since then.
BUT, and that's a big but, as a passive observer (and if Signal kept logs of things) you can still figure out group chat membership by looking at who sent the same kind of message (same length) to who, and at what time. Basic relationship graph stuff.
Once they become big they will be forced to keep that data. It is really difficult to force them to change the client or the protocol but not to force them to keep data they have access to on the server.
The Signal clients have this data, Signal's servers do not.
Didn't you see recently on HN they announced they now have a mechanism so that their servers aren't even aware of who sent a message? The recipient can tell who it's from but the server just sees like a stamp on the outside "This is one of the messages Bob agreed to receive from people" and it says to itself "OK, Bob said he wants these, don't care who it's from".
Users have to volunteer the tokens to friends (co-conspirators, lovers, whatever) or assert that they just love receiving garbage from strangers, so conventional "spam" is impossible.
AIUI
The system can count usages of Bob's tokens and rate-limit those. If Bob's Ex Gina is sending him fifty "Fuck you, Bob" messages per day, that might mean Bob's friend Harry has to admit his identity to the server to cut through the noise. Eventually Bob blocks Gina and she's no longer able to use his token and annoy his friends. Blocking someone invalidates your old tokens.
Yes, there is a way and it’s already in beta. It’s called sealed-sender and you can read about it in this signal blog post: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
They won't shut it down after paying billions (10?) for it. If they do, an alternative could rise. Imagine paying billions again. Running costs are very cheap in comparison.
I think the other two "mainstream" messengers I use (Telegram, KakaoTalk) are as simple or simpler and also ad-free. Kakao also has E2E encryption after a bit of a struggle, Telegram had it for a long time.
I think WA is the most widespread but I wouldn't call it the simplest or most reliable. They are all pretty similar imo
As opposed to the two you mentioned, WhatsApp has e2e by default. Kakaotalk and Telegram force you to use "secret chats" for that which are device to device only and cannot be shared among different devices with the same account.
There's two official desktop clients. One called "Telegram" and the other called "Telegram Desktop". Both are regularly updated etc.
The regular "Telegram" has secret chat. It is tied to device, but you can do desktop -> phone or desktop -> desktop or phone -> desktop specifically, but that depends on a bit of coordination.. but yeah definitely not synced between each combination
Even if you can pay to remove ads, you can't pay to restore privacy. So long as you've got a non-paying friend, Facebook will hoover up your phone number and chat history and social graph from their end instead.
Perhaps you take the basic features for granted. For example, it works well on a wide variety of devices, especially those with low specs. What about audio quality, which has gradually improved to the point where people I know don't make "normal" calls anymore. What about latency on awful connections. Often when I'm in a place with poor reception, Whatsapp works when other apps don't. All of these aren't build-and-you're-done kind of features. You need to invest continuously to make sure you don't regress.
And the flipside is that people will look at your app and say "what have you done for me lately? What features have you added?"
I am afraid I don't know much about call quality as I don't make calls through WA, but WA has always worked well on devices with low specs, and adding more features will only make it worse, not better.
Consider that large portions of the world (among them Germany with its extremely old population) use WhatsApp pretty much exclusively; they don't seem to have a problem using it.
Whereas something like iMessage would be a complete nonstarter with its semi-iOS exclusivity.
To be fair, the ad-free honeymoon that you were living in was obviously not a feasible steady state. Your messaging experience was being sponsored by VCs in the expectation of selling you to someone, in this case facebook
I'm pretty sure when I joined Whatsapp you could pay to have access for a couple of years, so it had a sustainable model, especially if they just turned the dial slowly on pricing.
WhatsApp charged users $1 per year until January 2016, when they had somewhere between 900M and 1000M users. Not sure how many of them were paying, since it wasn't really being enforced.
Yeah, how could a service like sending text messages from one device to another be free in the long term!? Think of the infrastructure and technology costs.
No, wait, most people on this forum could knock up a messaging app in a couple of days and run it on aws lambda for less than pennies per user per year.
All company need to make money, it's just a matter of when and how, Facebook's resources may have even did them good, as they can stay away from predatory investment funds that otherwise would bite they hard in the end.
Ahh, yes, telecoms will come to rescue poor users and give them free infrastructure.
Current state of messaging across the world is super messy and sucks, but believing that telecoms are the answer is just naive.
While sms allows you to communicate cross providers, the amount of money they charge, both historically and even nowadays for that is just insane. Att still charges $0.25 for international text messages, in 2018. Due to fragmentation of the market, the only way for them to stay in the game is to have something that’s shared, but boy, they do plan to make a lot money out of it.
so instead of being owned by 1 company, it's owned by various telecoms that will probably sell your metadata to advertisers and hand over everything (no e2e to law enforcement? I'd rather use centralized Signal.
I don't get the "messaging is infrastructure" argument. When in the past has this been free? Phone calls, the postal service etc. have always had a cost for the end user.
For physical mail it makes sense that the cost is mostly for actually handling actual pieces of mail. But for telecoms the main cost is fixed - so it makes more sense to pay for the network and then actually using it is free, or at worst, using it only costs extra if you're such a big user that you increase those fixed costs.
I pay £7 per month for this phone service. I believe the number of calls is theoretically limited (I've never hit the limit) but the number of text messages isn't.
> Wait, do you pay for phone call?
> I pay £7 per month for this phone service.
So you pay for phone calls? I don't think the message you are replying to is suggesting a cost per message. Just that it is usual for their to be a cost associated with the service (unlike WhatsApp at the moment).
I pay for service, and I'd be comfortable paying (though not very much) for my secure text message service the same way.
But I underscore that the service is what's important here and that's what I'm willing to pay for, not the calls. Imagine you find that your phone company, without you noticing, actually dropped 20% of your incoming calls. You didn't pay for those calls so who cares right? No, you pay for service, delivering other people's calls to you reliably is part of that service.
I pay for YouTube Red or whatever it's called now, same rationale. I pay, I get the service. YouTube doesn't make videos about Minecraft, TLS, US law, or whatever, but the platform I watch them on needs paying for somehow and I'm damn sure I don't want to watch adverts.
If you see an ad on Facebook messenger or WhatsApp, don’t hide it, instead Report It.
Report it as sexual content, report it as a scam, report it for whatever reason.
Guidelines, try to use different reasons and try to make it a realistic reason.
Facebook likes to gather our data for their ML, so let’s weaponize it. If we feed their platform garbage data, the ML will block the ads automatically, driving advertisers away or making report handling prohibitively expensive.
We likely only need 0.01% of users to feed garbage data to trigger their ML decisions. They’ll eventually be forced to find a better alternative.
All you're doing is following the same blackhat strategy that has been tried and prevented years ago. You know the one where you keep flagging your competitor's ads as abusive in the hope of getting them taken down. It's basically the same as click fraud.
In your case it's even more stupid since I assume you're doing so with a logged in account and without using proxy services so your IP will be static.
I guarantee that your reports has changed nothing other than make it more likely that your account is going to banned for abusing their terms of service.
It's trivial for them to auto-ignore such reports when they are coming from an account with abnormally high report rates. The effect of your protest will be, effectively, null.
This is interesting, but I have a feeling I'd face less resistance with friends and family if I just tried to switch them over to Signal and be done with the whole problem
I've been helping family and closest friends to ditch WhatsApp for Signal, without much success, so decided to come up with a deadline, announced to everyone and will be deleting WhatsApp then.
More friends have joined Signal the week I told them I was living by the deadline than in the previous years, where I was mostly ignored.
So you will make individual ads less effective, therefore lowering their value, therefore lowering their cost, therefore in order to secure revenue facebook will need to show you more ads?
I click on all ads that my adblocker doesnt filter. Charges them the PPC price while still beeing worthless. If enough people do that it will stop beeing worth it to the advertiser
It's not like there are dozens of Facebook out there. There's one. And nobody has targeting capabilities like they do. So if your product/company is suited to this marketing channel then you're going to stay with Facebook irrespective of whether the PPC price goes up by 1c. Which is probably the maximum effect you could ever hope to achieve.
And that's if their analysis of the click to conversions funnel is really good.
Otherwise, the OP is wasting time and bandwidth sending a "this demographic loves our ads, let's buy more of them" message to the brand, and a "these individuals like to click on ads so we can probably stick a few more in their message stream" message to Facebook...
A better way to monetize than Ads would be to slightly follow the Telegram model, they should create a store, ability to access an API, bots... Whatsapp did not evolve much in the past 3 years, it's maybe time to make it larger than just a chat app and create a real platform. Especially when you have entire countries using the app.
They don't necessarily need to "break it" but to evolve it a bit into a service. I'm sure you have people who would be happy to pay for bots, larger groups and business features (including myself). In some countries, WhatsApp is larger than a chat app, it's a social network but without any features, there's a gap somewhere here.
That gap is the feature, and I'm willing to pay to keep it that way. The moment bots start spamming my WA feeds/groups I'll be gone. I'll move to Signal and if my contacts don't do the same, I'll just switch back to SMS with spam filters.
Exactly same situation here wrt ads. I'm willing to pay for E2E encryption with my money. I'm not willing to pay with my time/attention/battery life/everything else ads entail.
I agree with you: if the subscription has to be by the user, the subscribed entity is managed like other contacts and I never get unsubscribed messsges/requests I would surely like to subscribe to the info that actually matters to me directly (conceptually opposite to “following feeds” on twitter). Completely personalized information and without installing one more app for every subscribed entity.
Nope, it just needs a more complicated way of handling the API where you run a Docker container with the client that does the E2E encryption, and you interact with that.
I only recently discovered WhatsApp spam when a spammer joined by a group invite link. The link had never been published publicly, and yet a spammer joined some 18 months after the group was used (the group related to a moment in time).
If this is the way WhatsApp is going I'd rather less API access for spammers.
Whatsapp daily user here. I understand the need for them to monetize but the second they add advertising and companies into the mix, they lose the sheen of their app.
whatsapp is purely for talking to people I know. That's their selling point for me. I don't want to see companies, ads, offers, sweepstakes or curated content. Just me and my family/friends.
The fact is that you will likely continue to use WhatsApp as long as all your friends remain on there though. The trick is to work out how much garbage can be stuffed into the app before people will abandon it en masse.
I suspect the threshold is a little lower for Whatsapp than Facebook Messenger as WhatsApp has a higher third world user base who have older, slower handsets and will see performance difficulties - hence Facebook's Lite apps for Android.
That threshold is going to be very low, at least for me. If my friends decide not to move, I'll just switch back to plain old regular SMS. I already have an SMS app that has spam filters, and that'll do just fine.
It's going to be a long process. Mobile carriers, like mine (O2 UK) don't really stand to gain anything from RCS. Until companies begin to offer additional functionality for RCS users, like branding, rich media and bespoke action buttons[0] and normal people start moaning or switching to a network that does support it, I really can't see them budging on their stance.
I was not aware of RCS until today. Looking at it I can see governments also being very keen to see it take off; since many of them are worried about end-to-end encryption hindering their ability to snoop on private conversations.
You can send to multiple, I guess that's what you mean? When someone replies, it doesn't neccessarily get send to everyone. It's like email with a bunch of cc's vs listserv.
So, when I form an SMS group, do my recipients not get it as a group? I was not aware of this. I thought that if I formed a group with A and B, and sent a message to A, it would show up on their side as "saagarjha sent a message to the saagarjha, A, and B group".
Not sure, maybe your SMS client has a way of encoding it somewhere in the metadata, and if the recipient uses the same client, it does show up like that? The SMS 'protocol' (if it's called that) doesn't have it, AFAIK, and no SMS I ever used had such functionality.
In some asian markets messengers are exactly the nightmare you describe and it seems to work brilliantly for them, users essentially spend all their time inside those messenger and even buy a lot of the stuff they need from there. If it's convenient enough, sadly not a lot of people will care.
China and WeChat springs to the top of my mind. You can pretty much buy anything you need using it, including giving tips, giving money to buskers etc.
No ads are coming in the messages part of Whatsapp. This is all about showing ads in the Status feature of Whatsapp. I am not sure if that will be enough for you to lose the sheen of their app..
I don’t. This isn’t how Facebook works. Paid opt outs drain the highest-earning advertisees from the pool. That removes Facebook’s ability to charge dubious ad rates.
It would surprise me. The first thing Facebook did when it bought WhatsApp was to rollback the price on iOS and to halt the Android pricing rollout. They don't want you to pay for it, it singles the remaining (ad-served) population out as being less willing to spend money. Not a good message to your advertisers.
I have many friends and a whole family who don't care about this. I tried to get people on Signal but it worked only for a handful.
It would be nice if at leat I could pay to keep WA clean (and please let me pay to keep my addresses to myself as well), because leaving it completely is impossible for now. Here in the Netherlands WA is the communications standard, even most company helpdesks are on it.
I manage quite well without it, and many other Dutch do too. I will fight for a society that doesn't depend on a tool that can only be used by getting into a legal agreement with Facebook and makes owning either an Android or IOS smartphone a requirement.
> I manage quite well without it, and many other Dutch do too
I wonder how you can manage without WA in the Netherlands. For me, all group events, sports, kids' activities, trips, vacations, family things, etc are managed in a whatsapp group. To "App" has entered daily Dutch vocabulary as a verb (meaning sending a whatsapp message). I'm in dozens of groups (none of them created by me) and participating in anything without it would be very unpractical.
People mail, text, or call me. Those who use WhatsApp know this and have the decency to take that into consideration.
I'll gladly deal with any downsides if that means maintaining the principled standpoint that being a member of society doesn't require owning either an Android or IOS smartphone, being forced to run someone's black-box proprietary software, and agreeing with some foreign mega-corporation's dubious terms of agreement. It's harmful for democratic society as a whole to engender such a dependency.
Besides, if the experience of friends and colleagues is anything to go by, opting in to Whatsapp means you get its downsides too: that one group member who keeps spamming everyone with noise, the constant demand for attention, the gossipy, sometimes down-right stalkerish neighbourhood watch groups (glad my neighbourhood hasn't hung up those sycophantic Whatsapp street signs), not to mention Facebook looking over your shoulder at the metadata level.
Every friend group has one or two people that interact with others like you do: It has to be on their terms, they have principles that get in the way, etc. That's beautiful and all the more power to you for doing so, but if you believe it doesn't impact you much more heavily than you make it seem here you are deluding yourself. You've made it so that including you in anything is effort. Effort that people need to expend consciously, and will not be the ground state. You've isolated yourself (to a certain degree) for your principles.
Principles rarely come for free, and I accept plenty of usable alternatives that don't suffer from the limitations of Whatsapp — it's not like I'm shunning the internet, computers, or even electricity. If people don't feel like including me is worth the effort because they are stuck in a walled garden, then good riddance. No one around me feels like that though. They readily accept that expecting everyone to buy either an Android or an IOS smartphone on top of any other computing devices they may own is not reasonable.
Besides, I'm not alone in taking this particular stance here in this country.
> I wonder how you can manage without WA in the Netherlands. For me, all group events, sports, kids' activities, trips, vacations, family things, etc are managed in a whatsapp group
This is the reason I have faint hope for government intervention here. Whatsapp has become critical infrastructure and a monopoly in NL. I would want to close my account when ads happen but it’s just too big an impact to do so. Because of the nature of messaging the alternatives are simply not an option unless everyone switches.
The reason I don’t use WhatsApp is simply because it requires full, unfettered access to your entire contacts to work properly.
When I explain to people that giving Facebook access to the contact details of my bank, psychotherapist, doctor, all work colleagues etc., they tend to understand
> it requires full, unfettered access to your entire contacts to work properly
I don’t give it these permissions. It requires punching in phone numbers, but that adds the right amount of friction to bounce communications to iMessage or a call.
Is there any way to get (nick)names to show up instead of just phone numbers? I tried revoking the contacts permission then realised how it could be quite difficult to find a chat in a long list.
That was long a differentiating factor between iOS and Android: Android's permissions were granted at install, iOS asked for each one individually, allowing much greater control.
But, I thought that was changing. Is Android not moving to the more granular model?
Yes, Android apps which want shiny modern features have to prompt on usage, but if an app says it is for old Android that couldn't do this it doesn't have to implement that behaviour (of course then it can't have new features since those didn't exist).
Google set a deadline for when no new "old" apps are allowed but I didn't pay attention to when that is.
I routinely tell (Android) apps that try to do too much that no they can't have access, but mostly I just uninstall them and use something better.
I like WhatsApp because it works really well and is easy to use. But on the day I see an ad and no option to get rid of ads by upgrading to a paid subscription, I will close my account.
> I will close my account.
And here lies the issue. Just you closing the account doesn't work. Your friends, your family, others you talk to on whatsapp shall also migrate. And that's the biggest issue.
I previously closed a ton of other social media accounts and guess what, my friends are still my friends and my family has not abandoned me. In fact I have more time for friends and family now. In hind-sight most social media use was just a giant waste of my time. Now people just call me or send me an e-mail when they need to contact me. Signal-to-noise is much better.
iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive, and not using Whatsapp would be social ostracisation since Android has a bigger market share than in the US.
In Mexico a lot of businesses have support numbers via Whatsapp. Heck, you can even order food and other stuff like LPG gas.
> > iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive
> But iMessage is free. It just uses your phone's internet connection, just like Whatsapp
Except when you're sending a message to someone who isn't an iMessage user, or if the "Send as SMS" option is enabled, resulting in what you thought was an iMessage becoming an SMS/MMS.
The blue/green colour difference, as well as the light grey text in the input field, isn't always immediately obvious.
By contrast, Whatsapp is always free. You can't send someone a message on Whatsapp and discover it's gone out as an SMS/MMS after the fact.
I know half of HN hates Telegram and I like it less than when I started moving (and to my defense that was before WhatsApp improved their crypto from close to nothing to state-of-the-art.)
It has served us well but I don't like the constant bragging combined with breaking a number of best practices and I'm looking for alternatives now and might start moving users to a system that stresses me less sometime during the next year. Alternatives right now are signal, matrix etc.
(Did I regret moving away from WhatsApp after they fixed their crypto? Not at all: they still uploaded all chats and sneakily tried to use all WhatsApp data to feed their spam cannon.
Matrix is certainly worth taking a look at. I always liked how whatsapp and telegram mobile apps were very snappy. That's something that is going to be fixed in riot quite soon, apparently.
I don’t know about chat, but i’m quite sure they didn’t just try to use WhatsApp metadata, but rather put it to full use. I believe they even admitted so.
I really don't mind the ads - they are a business after all. This will just push me to stop using the platform.
HOWEVER, I wish they had chosen a different monetization tactic. I would have much rather paid their $1 a year for the service. And given the amount of users they have, that could generate more than enough revenue for them to fund development.
Additionally, monetizing businesses and their integration into the platform also seems like a great idea. The businesses that find value in the platform will more than happily pay for the service.
Or, another idea: why not make me just pay for chat backup (like $1 a year for the app, $10 a year for chat storage, $20 a year for chat and pic storage, $30 a year for chat/pic/video storage) or something like that. That's something that's user AND privacy friendly.
It just makes me really sad that these ads are what Facebook chose. It's an excuse to not innovate and find creative ways to increase their revenue. It seems like they're taking the easy way out.
I wonder if this will prompt Apple to open up group iMessage, such as BlackBerry (belatedly) attempting to go cross-platform with an app. Charge Android users $1/year or /month for access to the ecosystem or something. Bye-bye WhatsApp overnight, in lucrative developed markets.
Apple doesn't need 'em though. What's $1/year to a $265bn/year company? Maybe Apple converts a few hundred million of them to iMessage. 0.1% revenue bump in return for devaluing a USP of their product and increased ongoing development and operating costs.
Plus I think you overestimate Android users' propensity to hand over even $1 in return for no ads.
The reason Apple Music is on Android is that the larger userbase directly gives Apple more bargaining power with labels.
What's $1/year to a $265bn/year company? Maybe Apple converts a few hundred million of them to iMessage. 0.1% revenue bump in return for devaluing a USP of their product and increased ongoing development and operating costs.
It would just be the same as them selling a 99c app, and the goal would be some of those users for their next phone switching to iPhone. And more high-ground kudos as “the privacy company” which is where their marketing is positioned right now.
Plus I think you overestimate Android users' propensity to hand over even $1
It seems to be a general thing on all platforms, people will pay $1000 for a handset and $5 for a coffee but hesitate to spend 99c on an app.
I think iMessage is currently a strong unique selling proposition for iPhone (in the US anyway; no one cares about it elsewhere), and offering it for $1 would reduce the likelihood of switching to iPhone - not increase it.
Apple isn't really in the business of making $1 apps (that I can think of) - just of selling them on behalf of others.
Maybe a I am an outlier, but I only use iMessage. If for some reason I have to message an Android user, I just let it fall back to SMS. In the US, unlimited SMS is a thing.
If only it was so easy. Why would users pay when they can send messages sent for free? Also, iMessage is not materially adding new feature against what Messenger and Whatsapp already offer - so adoption is going to be a massive uphill battle.
iMessage succeeds on Apply only because it is the DEFAULT SMS app which Apple took over and converted into a full blown Messenger solution. Highly unlikely this playbook will work out on Android.
Why would users pay when they can send messages sent for free?
A combination of awareness that TANSTAAFL and network effects - RIM sold plenty of BB hardware to people who just wanted access to BBM because that’s where all their friends were, so there’s precedent.
I think it’s pretty safe to assume that even if there were a paid option for FB, Insta, WhatsApp they would still do everything they could to monetise personal data, because that’s just the kind of company FB is, rapacious.
You're not going to reach the tipping point with just that. Most users don't care one iota about why their lunch is free. They know you feel strongly about that topic, but feel that they just have nothing to hide, that targetted advertisements are really pretty convenient, that they are rather good at ignoring advertisements, that they are not the real target after all with their modest income — that you are just fighting the inevitable based on some vague principle.
The majority at this point in time does not seem to care about privacy, but they do care about the price.
Also, what's the point of moving to just another walled garden? Apple will still keep the service proprietary and closed to third party clients, so you'll also lose the vocal software freedom folk in your approach.
Interesting, this must be very different in other countries. Pretty much every iPhone owner I know communicates via instant messengers, usually WA and not iMessage.
I think this really depends on where you live and what kinds of communication apps people use, since it doesn't help to use iMessage if nobody is willing to talk to you when you do.
Its interesting that many people here don't seem to know that in most of the world WhatsApp is already the go-to business messaging platform and a large portion of its user base subscribes to business services via WhatsApp. Organic promotion groups, local business contacts, and messaging lists have existed in India and other regions for a long time now. Its interesting to me that it seems that in the EU/US users generally so shocked by this.
I highly doubt that Whatsapp was ever for user privacy. Have you tried installing it first time? It won't function without permission to intercept your SMS, it won't function without giving it complete contact list (as opposed to select few numbers) and so on. And of course that data is sold... er... how they say it now - "analyzed" or "exchanged".
It's only used the first time you register your phone number to whatspp, to send a SMS with a unique code to verify the number. Someone thought it was a good idea to intercept all SMS rather than have the user write the code.
After moving to Portugal from UK, and terrible experience with local telecoms provider MEO (lies and horrific bills) I have to use VOIP.
Recently I’ve switched to using WhatsApp instead of Skype for most voice calls, curious if others are doing the same??
Audio Quality is mostly good and it’s much easier to find contacts than with Skype, because it’s based on their mobile number not a Skype ID.
On monetisation I would pay for voice calls to landlines/mobiles.
Also maybe they could do some kind of deal for international data roaming packages linked to a separate WhatsApp number. Predictable reasonable costs for voice and data - linked to a single mobile number - is still a major unsolved problem for travellers.
I am in the UK/ EU as well, my friends and I mostly use Whatsapp, FB messenger, Facetime for voice/video calls (especially when traveling/roaming) as most of them use this. Skype is mainly used for business or other "non-quick" purposes.Quite a few of them don't even have Skype enabled in the "always on" mode, open and login only when needed, unlike the others I mentioned.
As a business owner, I would love to use Whatsapp to communicate with my users. Not to spam or advertise, just communicate. The email open rates for our target audience (Indian college students) are abysmal, and SMS is just too unpredictable (but what we end up using because that's the best we've got).
I reckon that there would be similar business owners in my predicament who would just like to genuinely notify users. Just like with email, users can have an opt-out option as well.
I think some of this functionality is already there in their Business API (which is quite opaque fwiw).
On the other hand, I can see how this can quickly devolve into spam if used incorrectly (which is inevitable).
There's no stopping Facebook from shoving ads down our throats, but I hope they consider creating an option to remove the ads and provide extra features. For example, charge me something per year to add chat+media backups and group video calls.
Also, before Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook, didn't they charge something like 99 cents per year to provide backups?
Whatsapp paid for itself, more or less, IMO. A lot of people don't need FB to stay in touch with extended family, just Whatsapp groups. They are still in FB ecosystem, of sort.
FB needs to worry about the next quarter so they might ruin this and allow other apps to take over.
The article mentions ads on the private feed. I don’t use this feature, is it the leftmost tab — statuses?
Since most of the world runs on Android, they are already accustomed to ad supported software. While not a welcome change for me, I doubt I will ever encounter them.
Why do you think it didn't work? I've had the same experience, but with trying to move friends from telegram to signal. For me, I think it is because telegram is such a better experience from a UI standpoint. Signal is getting better, but it still feels clunkly.
It has a place (I use to to communicate with my friends in China, rather than using WeChat) but it's clunky and delivery is unreliable even to people in countries without censorship. Sometimes messages take hours to arrive at the other side.
Can Anyone build a what's app replacement and does anyone want to JV to market and scale the app through the wave of pissed off users that is eminent upon the roll out of WhatsApp Monetization.
We know one thing. Whats app monetization will be so nefarious and parasitic that there will be a mass exodus. Be there to catch the fall out and provide a responsible replacement that respects data sovereignty of individuals.
Living in a country where WhatsApp is ubiquitous, I really don't understand that. Is it just a lack of imagination on Facebook's part? Companies, from tiny ones all the way up to enterprises, will pay serious money to be able support customers over WhatsApp in an effective way. And then I've not even begun to consider the marketing channel WhatsApp could be (also without turning into a spam hotbed).
Facebook is the gatekeeper to WhatsApp, effectively a monopoly to a piece of core telecom infrastructure for a lot of countries. They could squeeze this out to the max. Right now, they give all of this away for nearly free and share the profit with the likes of MessageBird and Twilio. TBH i'd prefer they tax businesses than my eyeballs.