A better way to monetize than Ads would be to slightly follow the Telegram model, they should create a store, ability to access an API, bots... Whatsapp did not evolve much in the past 3 years, it's maybe time to make it larger than just a chat app and create a real platform. Especially when you have entire countries using the app.
They don't necessarily need to "break it" but to evolve it a bit into a service. I'm sure you have people who would be happy to pay for bots, larger groups and business features (including myself). In some countries, WhatsApp is larger than a chat app, it's a social network but without any features, there's a gap somewhere here.
That gap is the feature, and I'm willing to pay to keep it that way. The moment bots start spamming my WA feeds/groups I'll be gone. I'll move to Signal and if my contacts don't do the same, I'll just switch back to SMS with spam filters.
Exactly same situation here wrt ads. I'm willing to pay for E2E encryption with my money. I'm not willing to pay with my time/attention/battery life/everything else ads entail.
I agree with you: if the subscription has to be by the user, the subscribed entity is managed like other contacts and I never get unsubscribed messsges/requests I would surely like to subscribe to the info that actually matters to me directly (conceptually opposite to “following feeds” on twitter). Completely personalized information and without installing one more app for every subscribed entity.
Nope, it just needs a more complicated way of handling the API where you run a Docker container with the client that does the E2E encryption, and you interact with that.
I only recently discovered WhatsApp spam when a spammer joined by a group invite link. The link had never been published publicly, and yet a spammer joined some 18 months after the group was used (the group related to a moment in time).
If this is the way WhatsApp is going I'd rather less API access for spammers.
