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Comment by jmsflknr | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. WhatsApp currently has no business model. No ads. The app is free. This can be an interesting area to charge users some real money. In India, WhatsApp is already huge -- 400 million users -- so they have a reach that is unparalleled in the world's second largest internet market. And largest open market.

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WhatsApp's main business model is to infer relationships and social graphs on behalf of Facebook, since people trust WhatsApp with access to their contacts even though they might not trust Facebook.

I am in this group and recently my phone had problems. Moved to an older phone that was within the house. Decided not to give WhatsApp access to my contacts. The same is now basically as good as useless. I can't start a conversation with anyone unless I am replying to a previously shared with message. There is just no way you can input a contact into the message which is certainly a clever way of inferring the social graph. Well, now I am just about to give in to them.

https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=<PhoneNumber>

I use this link which will open in WhatsApp by default to send a WhatsApp message to someone who is not in my Contacts and don't want to add to my Contacts just to send a WhatsApp message.

It will be a pain in the arse to use for all your contacts and probably not worth the effort as if you use WhatsApp regularly (for an Indian there's no way around it) you will have sent a message to almost everyone on your contact list at least once and Facebook will know about it rendering the whole thing pointless.

Maybe someone can make an entirely offline app doing this, to allow you to WhatsApp your contacts?

If you're on Android, you could consider using the Shelter app to create a separate work profile for WhatsApp to live in. WhatsApp will then only have access to your work contacts (and work files etc.)

So then you can at least minimize the number of contacts you expose to WhatsApp to the number of people you're actually in touch with regularly over WhatsApp.

Here's an example of what a great role WhatsApp plays in India from just a few weeks back - https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/how-whatsapp-f...

People forget how many of that 400 million are illiterate and waiting to be taken for a ride.

"We can reach everyone therefore we should" mindless characters crawling like termites all over the place.

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