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Comment by quintin | Hacker News Reader

Its time to remind everyone that Facebook owns Onavo[1][2] and before any investor realizes, will pick up a product that hits their metrics threshold and buy them out.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...

[2] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/900893798821134336?lang=en

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This is a really good point. I don't think this is necessarily a bad acquisition at all. Onavo is basically Facebooks eye of sauron:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

TBH has been in the top 10 free apps for a few weeks now. FB has a good track record of buying small teams with good engagement numbers and letting them run themselves (Whatsapp/Instagram).

I'm sure Facebook looked at their numbers via Onavo and decided they were on a pretty good trajectory.

Also, it should be noted that TBH doesn't even have an Android app yet.

The question now is will TBH turn out to be more of a draw with friends (flash in the pan game) or have staying power like Bitmoji does.

Bitmoji was purchased by Snap Inc for around 100 million about a year ago. It has managed to consistently stay in the top 10 free apps since then:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/29/snapmoji/

I've never heard of this before, is there an honest review of Onavo out there other than bait for data collection?

We used to use them at a previous job -- they had a data product that would tell you what add networks competitor apps were using, their estimated market share in impressions, and what their ad creative was. Was a very useful research tool for digital marketing.

> TBH has been in the top 10 free apps for a few weeks now. FB has a good track record of buying small teams with good engagement numbers and letting them run themselves (Whatsapp/Instagram).

I can't comment on Whatsapp but I don't think this is an accurate description of Instagram. It took them a while, sure, but today they are most definitely asserting their control as overlords of Instagram even if they 'run themselves'.

Oh so how do you know that? Did they publish some article stating a change in control?

Anecdotal: Last Instagram update started giving me notifications from Facebook not related to my Ig posts.

Does Facebook even need Onavo for that? AFAIK any Android app can check which other apps are installed and the names of all other running processes, with little to no permissions. And since the main Facebook app is installed on most devices they can use that to gather the data. Not sure how accurate it is in comparison, but it definitely has a wider reach.

I guess the point is that owning Onavo gives them access to data about users who specifically are not actively using Facebook -- which is obviously the space where FB would be looking to do defensive acquisitions.

This is always interesting when it’s pointed out, but are teenagers in US high schools really using a fake security spyware VPN in high enough volume to give Facebook useful data?

Now that I say that, I wonder if they’ve tried marketing it to clueless people via their apps by touting it as a way to improve the security of their accounts or something.

This article is dated and I’ve never used Onavo myself but I think the pitch is it saves you money on your data plan:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-...

Teenagers are pretty cheap so I can see the appeal if that’s still true.

You'd think the kind of people who use HN would know better than to share AMP urls.

I refuse to click on that URL.

HN is a diverse community with many views.

If you understand the view of those who share these URL's, could you explain the merits of their case?

Now I'm not talking about using AMP on websites as I know the arguments for and against.

But as for linking to a resource from a third party site, why would one link to a mirror instead of the canonical URL?

Why not? The link works fine for me.

When the mirror is a faster-loading page (as experienced by normal users who don't have javascript blockers), then that makes perfect sense, no?

Just edit AMP out of the URL.

https://www.imore.com/onavo-app-claims-shrink-iphones-data-u...

It's really irritating to click on those links, so I think the request is reasonable. AMP pages take many seconds to load on some browsers.

> We will not sell the data or introduce ads to Onavo.

:-(

A lot of high school WiFi networks have blacklists for social media sites. Many kids use VPNs to get around it.

Yep. Or web proxies; I remember one that was disguised as an educational site, but if you entered the right credentials into the "admin area" login, unlocked a PHProxy instance.

This was also what led me to first install Tor.

"start using cgiproxy" used to be all you needed back in my day.

You could also throw the tor browser on a usb stick when i graduated.

Tor doesn't work everywhere. I'd don't know how they did it but it was blocked in my school's computer lab.

Probably just blocked the port.

Back in the day I've had a website ranking in the top 3 of Google for "start using cgiproxy". Honestly, I never knew why people would search for such a complicated phrase, but I've found the keyword somewhere and optimized the website for it.

Do you mind telling me why where you searching for that phrase instead of something like "free proxy" or "cgi proxy"?

Free proxy and CGI proxy alone used to generate lots of fake results. As "start using cgiproxy" is the title of a cgiproxy page you'd typically get less false positives.

In my era it was all about war dialing and AOHell.

Not if the filter system you were subjected to attempted to block any URL containing the substring "proxy"... This led to as many false positives as you might expect.

I remember my school network used to block the Sun Java SDK docs, for "hacking"... it made studying for AP computer science interesting. I forget the slightly dodgy vpn/proxy I wound up using to get around that - I think it had fire in its name, and was a super Web 1.0-style site filled with anarcho-libertarian rhetoric.

May Bess rot in hell.

Even back in middle school in the early 2000's, credentials to bypass the web blocker or address to a proxy that hadn't been blacklisted yet was a hot commodity - they were mostly sold/ distributed by entirely non-technical kids too.

Yes but that was back in the day of locked down desktop machines. Teens have smartphones now, they don't have to care about that.

Analytics is the free-social-network type product for app developers. Developers know they are giving all their valuable private data to the behemoths but they can't resist the few crumbs of value that they're given in return.

More: firms like Sequoia and Accel have tools/or buy similar data. But the more significant point is, Facebook has a pulse on the market and can compete or buy out anyone the moment they see trends that have a considerable potential.

This is a paranoia acquisition to kill a future competitor. If this works, and I think it will under FB’s strong leadership, its a win win for the tbh founders and FB.

If you care for a non-monopolistic future where privacy is valued, go work for Snapchat and push some sense into them; diversify and acquire companies like this to compete with FB (Even if you don’t like Snapchat).

How is a Facebook-Snapchat duopoly better than a Facebook monopoly?

Is that the best humanity can do in terms of designing these systems?

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