Now, free messaging apps need to adapt and change to survive; here's why

There is little money in free messaging, even though for years there was a suggestion that WhatsApp made money with the help of data mining

After quitting Yahoo! in 2007, Brian Acton and Jon Koum apparently applied for jobs at Facebook and were rejected. So they came up with something quite brilliant — and yet so simple — of their own, something that in 2014 cost Facebook $19 billion, an unprecedented amount paid for the acquisition of a venture-backed company at the time. Today, Acton and Koum’s creation unites more than 1.5 billion people across the planet and few would deny that even the thought of mobile communication without it seems absurd.

But come to think of it, all WhatsApp essentially does is offer us