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Comment by MomoXenosaga | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure I have never payed WhatsApp a single cent in the last 10 years so I don't see how I've been conned.

Hell how to get WhatsApp profitable seems to befuddle Facebook.

Ten years ago WhatsApp was a paid app on the App Store. They changed it to an annual subscription model (with plenty of loopholes to skip the payment), and then about 6 years ago they finally made it free.

Announcement of changing from upfront paid to subscription: https://blog.whatsapp.com/i-phone-v2-10-1-release-notes

Announcement of removing the subscription altogether: https://blog.whatsapp.com/making-whats-app-free-and-more-use...

Yes exactly. Almost no WhatsApp users have ever paid anything for it.

every wa user volunteers his message meta-data and probably the contents of their address book

> Hell how to get WhatsApp profitable seems to befuddle Facebook.

Facebook, the company that never charges for anything and makes money off data and ads? You are thinking you never paid for WhatsApp after using it for a decade?

I am. The only remotely valuable data WhatsApp makes available to Facebook is contact lists, and frankly they already have all that data.

WhatsApp is definitely losing them money, but it's obviously more than worth a small loss to have control over the messaging system that most of the world uses. Facebook doesn't want Google or whoever to get a popular social app and leverage that to move into spaces that Facebook actually makes money.

So I guess in a sense you could way we're indirectly paying for it via Facebook ads (if you actually use Facebook).

Well, they have "business WhatsApp" and now the infrastructure is built out and the apps are mature, I really wonder how much investment it actually takes. WhatsApp was a famously lean operation. Maybe 50 people at the time it was acquired, and the apps have hardly changed in years. I bet it can or does run with a skeleton crew. The competition is hardly intense.

I assume Facebook derives a lot of value from traffic analysis. Knowing who you talk to, when and for how long has value.

Unless you think that FB won't start serving you mortgage ads once they see you calling realtors

> Pretty sure I have never payed WhatsApp a single cent in the last 10 years so I don't see how I've been conned.

You gave up your privacy, which is worth a lot more than a few cents.

I did too, unfortunately. There's no way most people can be convinced to use anything else than the tool that connects them with the highest number of users, so when I had to install something on a old tablet to plan rehearsals with my old band I had no other choice than Whatsapp.

>You gave up your privacy, which is worth a lot more than a few cent

Not to me. So I really didn't give up anything.

this isn't about the money! it's about a basic messaging app that was unnecessary when major players were already available ala Google Talk, iMessage, even FB Messenger, and what drew a ton of ppl to WhatsApp especially internationally was that it said it was 'free texting' and ppl believed it because it used phone numbers as User IDs. But all it was was a basic internet messaging chat app and enough internationals in like India and stuff started using it that North Americans (where texting is super cheap and a non-issue) were eventually lured into using it just to try to keep in touch with ppl. While they all had gmail accounts and stuff already and could have used Hangouts or Microsoft or FB or whatever. WhatsApp just got random momentum and got lucky.

I guess what OP meant was you were conned by the impression that you get free "texting", while it's not actually texting (in the sense of SMS) but a propriatery protocol.

The things Whatsapp brought to the scene you couldn't do with SMS at the time. Everyone knew that.

No idea about MMS my country shut that service off years ago and I never used it.

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