Agreed. When they purchased it, people were obviously concerned, so they promised not to combine it with Facebook Messenger. But, at their F8 conference this year they announced they are going to unify them. So you're right when you say it doesn't feel like a facebook product yet. But, I guess it probably will at some point. I think we all knew this was coming though -- there's not much point in purchasing it if they're not going to leverage it one day.
FB purchased them because they were huge.
Sure maybe the "experience" hasn't changed from a UI standpoint but FB is weakening WhatsApp's end to end encryption and mining your conversations so under the hood the experience is radically different.
There is a reason the founders of WhatsApp quit FB post acquisition (literally leaving hundreds of millions of dollars behind) in disgust over the privacy abuses Facebook was proposing. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-co-founder-explains...
Given their history, I would be surprised if they don't do some on-device metadata analysis.
An anecdotal experience i might just chaulk up to coincidence if not for this but, was talking with a friend in WhatsApp something about babies, my friend was browsing Facebook at the same time about a minute or two after our conversation about babies, my friend started getting a bunch of baby videos popping in her Facebook feed that hadn't been there prior to our conversation.
Actual text of convo: not yet but soon. Metadata: yes.
Almost everyone I know uses WhatsApp. Funnily enough my family are the only ones who don't, and use iMessage instead. This isn't an active choice though, it's that they are on an iPhone and using SMS, so they get iMessage by default.
This is a long way of saying that for many Europeans, "Just use WhatsApp" feels like an obvious response, why wouldn't you?