Ex-WhatsApp employees built a new encrypted messaging app from scratch (Image: WHATSAPP • GETTY • EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS)
WhatsApp is comfortably the most popular chat app in the world, with over two billion users worldwide. But a new rival is trying to lure some of those users away. And it was created and designed by two of the first employees to work at WhatsApp.
The service, called HalloApp, will be available to both Android and iPhone owners. As you might expect, there are some similarities between WhatsApp and HalloApp – both apps are available on iPhone and Android, both are designed for individual and group chats with close friends and family, and neither contains ads. Like WhatsApp, HalloApp only allows you to add someone to the app if you know their mobile phone number.
Most importantly, HalloApp follows in the footsteps of the creators’ previous employer by ensuring that all messages are end-to-end encrypted. That means the team working on HalloApp can’t even see what’s being sent within the app. Only the intended recipient can decode the text message, image, or video to see what has been sent.
HalloApp co-founders Neeraj Arora and Michael Donohue both worked on WhatsApp before and after it was acquired by Facebook. Arora was WhatsApp’s Chief Business Officer until 2018, while Donohue spent nearly nine years as an Engineering Director at WhatsApp before leaving Facebook in 2019.
HalloApp has a simple interface, split into a feed with friends updates, group chats and one-on-one chats (Image: HELLOAPP)
The two ex-WhatsApp employees have not publicly spoken out against Facebook, but it is clear that no love is lost for Mark Zuckerberg’s massive social network. And they are not alone. WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton have both left Facebook over disagreements with the parent company over plans to introduce ads in WhatsApp. Acton, who uses his fortune to fund encrypted messaging app Signal, tweeted “#deletefacebook” in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
HalloApp has four tabs: a home feed of posts shared by friends, a list of active group chats, all your individual chats, and a settings tab. The overall look is minimal and there are no algorithms that sort messages or group chats based on what it thinks you want to see. And, as mentioned above, not a single advertisement.
Neeraj Arora shared the philosophy behind HalloApp in a blog post, in which he labels engagement-driven social media as ‘the cigarette of the 21st century’.
“Imagine if your friends online were your real friends,” he writes in the blog. “Imagine if your feed wasn’t filled with people and posts you didn’t care about. Imagine scrolling through meaningful moments and seeing what you wanted you to see — not what the algorithm wanted you to see. Imagine that you are not treated like a product.
Where you hoped to find your friends, you instead found ads, bots, likes, filters, influencers, followers, misinformation and more. Where you hoped to have meaningful conversations, you fell into it instead rabbit hole of flashing red notifications and an algorithmic feed of meaningless content.
“Where you hoped for a safe place to keep in touch with your siblings, relatives, neighbors and friends from college, you found content from people you’ve never met before — the whole thing felt invasive, even creepy.”
How does HalloApp manage to keep itself afloat without ads? Well, the business model will immediately be known to anyone who used WhatsApp before it was acquired by Facebook.
In the company blog, Arora explains: “Unlike older social networks, we believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. HalloApp uses your phone’s address book to connect you with the real relationships in your life, which is collect, store, or use personal information (we have no idea where you live, what you do for work, or how likely you are to use a particular type of content.) More importantly, we will never show you ads .
“Instead, we plan to offer additional features for a small price in the future.”
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