Yet I disagree with the article in many points. It didn’t always belong to Facebook, and that’s how it started, originally it even asked for something akin to one dollar for one year of usage (it was converted to some very small amount for each country).

One should also understand that in countries like India, Brazil, and a few others SMS and Internet on phones are extremely expensive. WhatsApp provided a very nice way to bypass SMS and stay within the lower plans for internet usage on mobiles. The big advantage here was to use your work or home internet to still reach out to people.

I know that in Brazil telcos introduced an entry line phone plan at one time saying that Whatsapp messages would be exempted from data caps.

Eventually, Facebook bought WhatsApp.

Saying it is simple to replace WhatsApp without considering the economic situation of the people relying on it is absurd.

Comparing it to FOSS alternatives at the current stage is easy enough, but every attempt at creating a FOSS alternative didn’t take. It is not uncommon to see the FOSS software not prioritizing the functionality and needs of users, and that will have people flock to whatever is useful to them, despite possible hidden costs.

I say this as someone who uses Matrix for chat, yet there are some critical bugs in usability that developers just ignore (like doing something basic like sharing from IOS breaks the spec and causes errors to several others).

When things like these happen there is always someone who will come ahead and say “this is provided for free” or “learn to code and fix it yourself”.

Eventually we get Pikachu faces or articles talking about the greatness of FOSS while ignoring all the main point “people still need a stable tool that fits their economic power while someone argues about how to fix a problem they don’t really care about”. As someone who mostly uses open source software, this is really frustrating.