Neeraj Arora was WhatsApp’s chief commercial officer and one of the principal negotiators, now regrets the sale to Facebook.
The company led by Mark Zuckerberg acquired the instant messaging application for $22 billion dollars in one of the most important acquisitions in the technology industry.
But Arora has revealed that he regrets the sale to Facebook.
“Nobody knew at first that Facebook would turn into a Frankenstein monster gobbling up user data and spitting out dirty money. Neither did we,” Arora wrote in a Twitter thread he posted on May 4.
“Today, WhatsApp is Facebook’s second-largest platform (even larger than Instagram or FB Messenger). But it’s a shadow of the product we poured our hearts into and wanted to build for the world,” Arora said.
According to data from the beginning of the year 2020, WhatsApp is the leader in instant messaging in much of the world. It exceeds 2 billion users, surpassing other applications such as Facebook Messenger or Telegram.
Although the application was launched in 2009 mainly for iOS, and a year later for Android, it arrived for Windows. In the end, it became massively popular from approximately 2012 to the present.
WhatsApp displaced the SMS service, forever revolutionizing the instant messaging service thanks to the multiplication of smartphones and Internet access.
The sale to Facebook
On February 19, 2014, the application was acquired by the Meta company (then called Facebook) for 19,000 million dollars, of which 12,000 million corresponded to shares of Meta, and the rest, in cash. In October, the final purchase of WhatsApp by the then for the value of 21,800 million dollars was announced.
Arora commented that Whatsapp stipulated some non-negotiable conditions to which the directors of Facebook agreed at the beginning of the negotiations.
Some of the conditions included not using user information for data mining, not serving ads, and not implementing cross-platform tracking.
But in 2017, things began to change, and Facebook changed the course of WhatsApp’s strategy.
In 2018, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was shown that Facebook had not respected the agreements and had violated all the principles under which Whatsapp was governed.
“Tech companies need to admit when they’ve done something wrong,” Arora said of the Cambridge Analytica case.
New Version of WhatsApp
WhatsApp recently announced the new features that will arrive with the application’s update.
WhatsApp finally adds to the new update the expected reactions with emojis to messages and the opportunity to share files of up to 2 GB in weight.
Through its Twitter account, the Meta messaging platform said that users would be able to start enjoying these new functions beginning this May.
Although in his Twitter message, he did not add anything about the reactions with emojis, in his official blog, he said that these would also arrive in the next update.
“We are delighted to announce that emoji reactions are now available in the latest version of the app. Reactions are fun, fast, and also reduce message overload in groups. In the future, we will continue to improve this feature and add many more expressions,” says in the blog.
There will be four possible reactions in the image shared on the social network’s blog: hands together, a red heart, a happy face, and a thumbs up. For now, it is only sure that those are available.
In addition to the reactions with emojis, which are the most anticipated update of the platform, in the latest update it will be possible to share files of up to 2 GB at once, and with the protection of end-to-end encryption.
This increases the previous limit, which was 100 MB. “We think it will go a long way in improving collaboration between small businesses and school groups.” To prevent people from running out of data, the messaging application recommends that when files of this size are to be shared, a WiFi network is used.
Another feature
Last month the messaging platform announced the Communities feature. “Communities on WhatsApp will allow people to bring together different groups while maintaining a structure according to the needs of each case.”
Users can get updates sent to the entire Community and organize smaller discussion groups to talk about what’s relevant to a group of people.
This modality will provide administrators with tools to send announcement messages to members of all groups or assign the group to which the information will be shared.
“We believe that the Communities option will make it easier for a school principal to share the most important updates with all parents and create separate groups for specific classes, extracurricular activities, or volunteer needs,” WhatsApp asserted.