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I want to tell a story about Whatsapp that is unrelated to that, but incidental, and the reason why this seems too much to me. I don't like the company even if
by antirez 8y ago
I want to tell a story about Whatsapp that is unrelated to that, but incidental, and the reason why this seems too much to me. I don't like the company even if I use Whatsapp every days since the start, because when it started to spread in Europe, at the start of the iPhone and Apple store era, Whatsapp was the worst thing ever in the app store in terms of how strongly they advertised their platform, almost in a spammy way, everywhere. Moreover the application was pure garbage. It was not just unencrypted, but the IMEI of the phone hashed with the phone number, or something like that, was used to authenticate to the service. There was zero attempt at privacy. Later when they made big money they fixed it, but still... Fast forward the acquisition, there was another element I did not like: they really did a big noise about how scalable was Whatsapp 'cause it was FreeBSD + Erlang based, one thing that I believe was not honest. Whatsapp was very scalable fundamentally because they just acted as a bridge without storing anything. The backends were probably also decently designed, but not because FreeBSD + Erlang, you could do it differently with the same results. Moreover many times here in Europe where it is massively used, during like xmas or at the new year party time, it goes down, so... like everybody else on earth. And now that story. I never liked the company vibe, and I think he should stop with this Facebook story, because you are the actions you make: don't trust the big social network model? Well, develop your company and find a business model you like. Now it's late to cray. Besides I don't think Facebook is doing anything terrible with Whatsapp.
- slig 8y agoI remember that they false advertised it on App Stores as "WhatsApp - Free SMS".
- antirez 8y agoExactly, among the many other similar things.
- notyourwork 8y agoThis reads less like a story and more like a rant. You don’t like the app or it’s root, so what? I’m not clear what your stories intention is.