The day I was banned from Whatsapp

Yesterday, my Jolla returned from a short stint with Jolla care. I unmounted my Palm Pre2 (which I used for the time my Jolla was not available) and began to set up my phone again - apps, Android support, accounts.

One of the apps I needed regurlarly, although I would prefer using something different for messaging, was Whatsapp. My friends are sending me pictures and do some chatting, my basketball team is organizing itself usinga Whatsapp group. I am using Mitakuulu - and indie Whatsapp client available for SailfishOS. There is no official client, of course -same on webOS and FirefoxOS - so my devices of choice are depending on third-party developers to do some magic. Mitakuulu is very well integrated with SailfishOS, so I never opted in using the Android client.

Today, I got banned from Whatsapp, because I do not use the official client. I suspect the official ones are sending more data for facebook to work with, so they loose money when someone is just implementing the core functionality. I was not warned, neither do I have any chance (other than sending an email to support) to recover my account.

Strange thing is: I do not really care. If Whatsapp does not need me as a customer and user, I do not need their service. Why are they banning users not using iOS, Android, WinPhone or Symbian? Those are platforms the official client is available. They do not bother making an official client for SailfishOS, they never did for webOS (although webOS probably had more market share back in the days). Is there a client for Blackberry? I do not know.

What I do bother about is that all of this is happening only after Whatsapp was aquired by facebook. Maybe this is a reason to finally quit using facebook for me…