Mark Zuckerberg criticises iMessage and claims that WhatsApp is more "private and safe."
Apple iMessage is the target of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's most recent Instagram post. He asserts that WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, is much more private and safe than iMessages. He continues by listing capabilities of WhatsApp that are absent from iMessage, such as end-to-end encryption and message disappearance.
A billboard in New York City for Meta advertising promotes WhatsApp over SMS or iMessage in conjunction with the Instagram post. It provides a side-by-side comparison of WhatsApp's 'Private' bubble with the Green and Blue bubble technique used in iMessage.
'WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption that works on both iPhones and Android devices and includes group chats, making it significantly more private and secure than iMessage. With WhatsApp, you can also choose to have all new chats automatically end with a single button press. Additionally, we added end-to-end encrypted backups last year. All of which iMessage still lacks,' Zuckerberg wrote in the Instagram post. The privacy ad campaign, as noted by The Verge, is a significant push for Meta. It will 'appear on broadcast TV, digital video, outdoor, and social across the United States,' according to spokeswoman Vispi Bhopti, and billboards will start to appear in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Over 2 billion people use WhatsApp worldwide. In the US, it is not the default texting app. Meta seeks to increase WhatsApp's US user base. Recently, Meta has promoted WhatsApp focused on security and privacy. Not just Meta, but other tech firms have criticised iMessage from Apple. Apple's Messages app should support RCS, the SMS replacement, according to Google's pressure on Apple. A valid criticism of Apple's privacy-focused iPhone advertising is the reality that iMessage still relies on SMS and cannot be used to securely message people who use Android phones.
The absence of deleting texts from Apple iMessages is another functionality that is lacking. Apple has made it possible to call back messages up to two minutes after you sent them with iOS 16.p.
