In 2014 , the owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg , reached a purchase agreement on the instant messaging WhatsApp for the price of 22,000 million dollars . Since then, the globally popular app has gone through several phases of digital transformation and innovation.
Now, several years after that transaction, WhatsApp’s former business director, Neeraj Arora , said he regretted having sold the application to the CEO of what is now known as Meta .
“Originally, WhatsApp made money by charging users $1 to download the app. We didn’t want cross-platform ads and tracking, and Facebook said they agreed and believed in our mission,” Neeraj said through his Twitter account.
At the time of purchase, the former director assures that Mark Zuckerberg had promised them to maintain the main vision of the creators , which was not to track users, nor collect their data, much less include advertising in the application. However, this was not fulfilled by Meta.
The new vision of WhatsApp
Over the years, Meta, which owns the three big applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram , has managed to unite the three social platforms and users can share and interact with each other. Making a unique style to the three signatures.
However, the former director of WhatsApp pointed out that there are other executives who also regret having sold the instant messaging application.
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They point out that the application is currently very far from the mission they had planned, in addition to expressing that they feel that Mark Zuckerberg deceived them.
“Today, WhatsApp is the second largest Facebook platform (even larger than Instagram or FB Messenger). But it is a shadow of the product in which we turned and wanted to build for the world”, said Neeraj Arora.