That's not entirely true. They did charge something tiny to use the app (I think it was ~$2/year) but in many countries (outside the US where they were much more popular) they didn't block users who didn't pay. If you didn't want to see annoying reminders you would just pay and get rid of it. Many people I know never paid.

For me it simply displayed "the next year of service is on us" once a year, every year. Paying for WhatsApp was something of an urban legend.

i paid for whatsapp back in 2012. it was a paid app on the app store. it wasn't much - $1, and everyone had to pay for it to download. later they made it a free app. i am more than happy to pay for a messaging app for myself and my close family, and i dont like the idea of sharing the data with fb. there needs to be a paid alternative.

> there needs to be a paid alternative.

Just use Signal. It's free, open source, and end-to-end encrypted.

https://signal.org/

On the other hand, you will have an absolute pain trying to transfer messages to another device. To move from one android device to another you have to manually make a database backup (hope you didn’t lose your old phone!) and copy it over to a new phone. Moving from an iPhone to another iPhone is slightly better since you just have to have both iPhones and then the app can sync the data across. However if you try to move from Android to iOS or vice versa, you are absolutely screwed. There is no way to get your data transferred to your new device and there is no way to get your data out of signal, even the database backup the Android app has doesn’t include everything. Say what you want about WhatsApp but at least thanks to GDPR my data isn’t permanently trapped in one app forever with no way to get it out.

That's a good point. I haven't really thought about transferring messages since I use Disappearing Messages [1] for almost all conversations.

[1] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320771-Se...

I now remember it being a paid download on iOS but free on Android, and all my smartphones since the dawn of the duopoly ran Android, so...

I had paid for at least one year (just $1), may be two (don't remember exactly). I would be glad to pay more, but Facebook played a big game and now we're all stuck with it because at least in India WhatsApp is almost a necessity.

Thankfully in Russia it is not. Some people prefer it for some reason but there's no hard requirement to have it to be a part of society. I haven't even bothered to set it up on my new phone I bought a month ago and there was no discomfort resulting from that. Though I do still need to download my data and delete my account so people won't even try messaging me there.

Great for you! Here everyone (including the carpenter, plumber, bank/finance people and more) almost expects you to have whatsapp. Even some of the biggest businesses are on Whatsapp offering product/order updates, customer service and more. Not to mention every friend of yours would constantly pester you to be on it. I guess one could live without it, but it will be pretty uncomfortable and you'll lose touch with almost all of your friends and relatives.

Here 99% of my messaging with real people is covered by VKontakte and Telegram. I can't even fathom using WhatsApp for any kind of serious communication because of how inconvenient and unreliable it is. "Can't download media, please ask them to send again", my ass. What kind of engineering does even lead to this?! And the fact that I have to use my phone while sitting in front of a computer is a non-starter. The web version still uses the phone and occasionally wipes itself completely so you have to set it up again.

The modern day WinRAR

I paid.. almost nobody had WhatsApp

They didn't monetize it because in countries like India if you were to monetize it most users would stop using the app. This I guess is the alternative. Thing is there is no reason to believe others apps won't do the same in the future.

I can confirm this. No one in my circles ever paid and the banner never went away.

I have to say that prior to being free of charge, it wasn't nearly so popular in most markets. Viber was king in my country and individuals still used SMS outside a "messaging of last resort" use case it has become.

Did they have that ever on iOS? I’ve never seen it.

Been an iPhone prisoner/beaten-wife/lover since 2010. Whatsapp charged $1 per year for update. Happy to pay that in exchange for knowing that my familyand network information and more importantly info about my kids won’t be sold for pieces million times a minute on the digital ad auction markets.

IIRC they charged for the app download on ios, and on android the initial download was free, but with a promise that they would start charging an annual fee soon. But that never happened. They kept extending the deadline and then got bought out.

On iOS there was a one-time purchase fee. I recall there theoretically also being an annual charge, but IME this was always waived.

This is what I remember, tho I guess it’s possible they changed the terms for new users. But I bought it in late 2009, IIRC and it was either $0.99 or $2.99.

yes they did