It’s that exciting time again where the big tech companies announce their earnings. I’m sure everyone wants to know those results and read how that means Apple is doomed again, Amazon keeps everyone happy by not making any money, and Google and Facebook sell more ads on mobile than ever before. As it happens, I really don’t care about it all so I won’t be writing about it.

Whatsapp

Looking back at the past week, it seems like there still isn’t much going on as the biggest tech news I came across (and haven’t written about yet) was Whatsapp dropping its subscription fee. As an iOS and early Whatsapp user, the only time I had to pay for Whatsapp was when I initially bought the app. This was a long time ago though, and I completely forgot about their strange business model here. If I remember correctly, it was free “forever” if you bought the app on iOS before it was free, but you had to pay a yearly fee of 1 dollar if you got the free app on Android and later iOS. That yearly fee only started after a year though.

Among my family back in The Netherlands, Whatsapp is the main way of contacting each other (no free sms there), but I never really heard anyone needing to pay this fee despite them using the free app. This just makes me think that maybe the model was an even bigger mess than what I wrote above. Looking back at it, I have no doubt this fee and confusion probably prevented a lot of users from using Whatsapp due to lack of a credit card so if the goal is to get more users I have no doubt this is a positive change. Additionally, it probably didn’t have a gigantic impact on Facebook’s balance sheet either and they probably prefer it if more people use the app.

Because from Facebook’s perspective is probably the data Whatsapp holds is probably far more interesting, and it looks like they might start trying to collect that. Not exactly a surprising move, as they need to get something back from the 22 billion they paid for it. As usual when something like this happens, there is a minor uproar about it which will no doubt change into acceptance soon enough and a few months after it’s been introduced nobody will remember it used to be different. Maybe a couple of people will stop using the service, but anyone who cares about their privacy enough is unlikely to be using anything owned by Facebook anyway.

From a financial standpoint, it’s also fun to have a look at what Whatsapp said they’re going to do to make money. In Asia, messaging services like Line have made a business out of a mix of several things, from selling stickers to integration with companies. The latter seems to be what Whatsapp is proposing to do as well.

Whenever I’m in Hong Kong I’m always surprised by how often businesses will have Whatsapp contact information instead of a website, so it seems to me that doing something with that integration has possibilities. I’m curious to see how Facebook will try to improve on the existing setup in order to make money with that though.

Other stuff

To be clear, there was a lot of other stuff going on in the last week, ranging from executive shuffles at Twitter to yet another round of rumors concerning possible new devices from companies. While that sort of thing happens, I’m either not interested enough¹ or don’t feel like I know enough about the reasoning and/or consequences.

Rumors you can read about everywhere, and if you want to have a good understanding of the ramifications of the other stuff I can recommend having a look at Stratechery where Ben Thompson does a good job with his weekly articles, and an even better job with his daily subscription email. I on the other hand, will keep to the kind of subjects I’ve been writing about and that sometimes means there is less to say.