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WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

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713 points greenburger | 1 comments | 16 Jun 25 13:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mrtksn ◴[16 Jun 25 14:07 UTC] No.44289633[source]▶
Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services?

I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.

It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.

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ajsnigrutin ◴[17 Jun 25 00:23 UTC] No.44294581[source]▶
Me? Never again.

I used to... like some app, paid for a "PRO" version to get additonal features. Everything was ok.

Then 6 months went by, and they added a cloud feature, to upload some stuff and configs and sync between devices, and it turned from one time payment to a subscription plan. Then built-in features got moved into the cloud, and previously working stuff didn't work without subscriptions anymore. Then they added ads. PRO has maybe 2 more features than a free version and no nag screen at the start, and that's it.

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PenguinCoder ◴[17 Jun 25 01:36 UTC] No.44294951[source]▶
Which app? I paid for pro fairmail and don't have that issue with the app, currently. Which is what I'd expect.
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ajsnigrutin ◴[17 Jun 25 11:52 UTC] No.44298016{3}[source]▶
I forgot what it was called, it was years ago. It was one of those "scan" with the camera to create PDFs of documents with some basic OCR included. The cloud feature gave you some cloud space, but OCR has to be done on the cloud (used to be locally done).

Even some quasi opensource software is no better... OsmAnd (openstreetmaps for android app) had a paid "OsmAnd+" version (that i bought), and then they decided they need a "pro" version too, 2.99/month, to get 3d relief and "colored routes".

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1. int_19h ◴[17 Jun 25 17:11 UTC] No.44301366{4}[source]▶
To be fair, OsmAnd bears the cost of hosting those maps, and when you consider that OsmAnd+ allows you to literally download the entire globe for offline use (which translates to hundreds of gigabytes of traffic), it's clear that they need some kind of ongoing revenue stream to be sustainable. And hillshade tiles (3D terrain) are particularly large since they need to be bitmaps rather than vectors like basic maps, so making their users bear more of that cost is not unreasonable.