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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Funny that those cheap phones dont run WhatsApp natively. Remember when WhatsApp was new, one narrative was that it was so successful because it had a client for absolutely every system, including Symbian and Java Mobile.

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Apparently they run a fork of FirefoxOS under the hood:

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/reliance-jio-feature-p...

There used to be a barely-working whatsapp client on FFOS while it was still alive. OpenWapp was the name. And you could register/authenticate via SMS. Stopped working at some point though because whatsapp api changes.

interesting...so FirefoxOS ended up being somewhat of a success.

There is no value in collecting social graph data on owners of $20 phones.

It's a long play... Being the defacto messaging system in a country like India is certainly a position worth protecting.

But for how long.. IM apps come and go.

That's the big question that I think Facebook spends billions of dollars protecting: can we make IM users stick?

I think at some point, it becomes sticky if a huge part of the population has it.

So I don't think Facebook will try to shut down this guy. He is doing free work for them.

Allow me to repeat my comment from above: he could read/modify/inject arbitrary chat content. He could embed ads into Whatsapp interface. Lots of tech companies are trying to 'build for next billion', but this is clearly not the way forward.

It’s possible they used to. WhatsApp stopped supporting a range of older phones at the start of 2018.

that's probably a large portion of their market share, even if it was costly to support older devices, it was probably worth the DAUs

Very good point. I believe whatsapp is the one to be trolled.

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