Facebook and Apple’s war has been on for quite sometime now. Apple CEO Tim Cook as well as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have openly criticised each others’ companies, no holds barred. The latest from Facebook camp to slam Apple is WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart. Speaking on the ‘Big Technology Podcast’, Cathcart didn’t have good words for the iPhone maker.
Cathart said that Apple’s privacy labels are discriminatory and that the company is in fact not in favour of people using Android phones. “I assume it’s in Apple’s interest to have everyone using an iPhone, I mean, obviously, it is. And you look at a place like the U.S., most people have an iPhone, and the messaging experience works better on iMessage if everyone else has an iPhone,” said Cathart. “It’s certainly in their strategic interest that people not use something like WhatsApp because they want people to not use an Android phone,” he added.
According to new privacy labels rolled out by Apple earlier this year, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger collect a lot more data compared to other top messaging apps. Facebook Messenger app reportedly has 65 different privacy labels which includes third-party advertising, product personalization, app functionality and “other purposes,” while WhatsApp has 16 labels.
Talking about these privacy labels, Cathart said, “Regardless of whatever the purpose of the labels was, we compete with iMessage from Apple, we compete in the U.S. — where way more people use iMessage than use WhatsApp — we compete in a bunch of places around the world. You don’t see a label for iMessage when you download it because you don’t download it, it’s on your phone to begin with. And so, we were critical of that.”
As for what phone he uses himself, Cathart said that it is Android. “Well, I use an Android because if you look at WhatsApp’s user base, we are very Android heavy. I also use an iPad, I’ve used iPhones for many years, but I really want to actually use the product in the way most people are using it, so I use an Android. A lot of people use both or go back and forth because we’re building our products for both and you got to understand them all.”