If, by "built around privacy", you're referring to end-to-end encryption, that was introduced (fully) to WhatsApp in 2016. Facebook acquired WhatsApp in February 2014. Open Whisper Systems announced their partnership with WhatsApp in November 2014. Facebook could have easily slashed that end-to-end-by-default idea if they wished to.

I think we need to give credit to Facebook where credit is due, and it sure seems like Facebook's management wanted WhatsApp to be private for some reason.

I see no indication that WhatsApp was "private" in any way before Facebook acquired it.

Whatsapp was never about apps and never about anything but messaging. Integrating any of the features that make money for FB would've driven users away. The only thing they brought to Whatsapp is Stories (apparently all apps need this now) but I don't know anyone who uses it on Whatsapp. It's always empty on whatsapp while people happily use it on Instagram.

I can't imagine how the Whatsapp acquisition will ever pay off. It doesn't need to because they make money with FB and Instagram but I don't see why they had to buy it..

Others have touched on this... but I bet it's also to lock down that market space. Facebook's competition is communications platforms. By preventing anyone else from dominating the secure communications space, they don't face that threat.

I think they bought it purely to prevent it evolving into a competitor. It's got too many users to kill off as a product, and at least they are 'Facebook' users in a roundabout way, and by not adding anything anything new to WhatsApp they can keep it subjugated. Keep your enemies closer and all that.

Also their codebases are beyond incompatible. Facebook uses Hack, a PHP derivative while Whatsapp is Erlang. You'd need to completely rewrite the latter to integrate it but you'd lose the incredible efficiency of Whatsapp doing so.

Why do the codebases need to share a similar set of languages and tools? Integrating two services doesn't necessarily mean merging them into a single product; Facebook could likely allow the two to communicate without a complete product merger.

Are you sure about that? Is Hack / PHP powerful enough to handle billions of messages an hour? If so, i'm impressed.

But I doubt it and I'm sure you're wrong about what runs Messenger. No company, least of all the Facebook scale ones use just one language for everything.

Of course the backing service is not PHP. That would be a particularly poor choice for a high volume messaging statement. They originally wrote it in Erlang and later rewrote it in C++.

https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-usi...

statement -> service

sigh