The long-running rivalry between Facebook and Apple is nothing new, with both companies’ CEOs, i.e. Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, having explicitly criticized each other’s companies on different occasions. However, things have gotten uglier with allegations against Apple put forth by the WhatsApp CEO in a recent podcast.
The feud between the two tech giants has only deepened ever since Apple made privacy changes with the App Tracking Transparency framework, meant to prevent apps such as Facebook from tracking user activity – a phenomenon that contributes significantly to the social network’s advertising revenues. The WhatsApp CEO, Will Cathcart declared Apple’s privacy labels as discriminatory while also alleging that Apple does not want people using Android phones.
“It’s certainly in their strategic interest that people not use something like WhatsApp because they want people to not use an Android phone,” Cathcart said.
Talking about privacy labels, Cathcart said that regardless of the purpose these labels serve, WhatsApp competes with iMessage (Apple’s own messaging app) and in the US the percentage of people using iMessage is higher than WhatsApp.
Read More: WhatsApp currently working on password-protected encrypted chat backups
