An analytics app Meta acquired a decade ago turned into an important resource for product and business decisions, including its work to “clone” Snapchat.
Facebook, as the company was then known, acquired Onavo in 2013. The Israeli app was cofounded by Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger, who went on to high-ranking positions within Meta: Rosen is the company’s chief information-security officer and Tiger was vice president of engineering until he left in 2022.
For several years, Onavo was key to how Meta decided to acquire, launch, and change its products, according to over a dozen court documents unsealed last week in a lawsuit. The case was brought in 2020, accusing Meta of anticompetitive actions that allowed the company to grow to a massive scale that gave it monopoly power in the market for social-media ads.
These unsealed documents showcase discussions about Onavo and its capabilities. They include quotes and snippets of internal emails, private chats, and transcripts from case depositions from many Meta executives, such as CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Sheryl Sandberg, its former chief operating officer; Mike Schroepfer, its former chief technology officer; its chief product officer, Chris Cox; and Javier Olivan, its chief operating officer.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.
Meta tried to ‘build a clone of Snapchat’
In an email from 2012, in which Sandberg, Olivan, Cox, Schroepfer, and Facebook’s then-deputy general counsel, Colin Stretch, discussed the acquisition of Onavo, Rosen is quoted as saying his app’s “core skill set” is the “reverse engineering” of other apps.
After the acquisition, Facebook found out through Onavo’s data on messaging apps that Snapchat was a top-five mobile app and WhatsApp had begun to outpace Facebook Messenger. In 2013, the company offered to buy Snapchat and was rejected. In 2014, it successfully acquired WhatsApp.
In 2016, at the behest of Zuckerberg, a team within Onavo was set up to track how people used apps like Snapchat, Amazon, and YouTube after figuring out how to effectively decrypt such data, which Business Insider reported based on emails included in the unsealed records.
In one email, Zuckerberg asked Olivan, who was then Facebook’s vice president of growth, for information and data on “participation rates and usage in Snapchat for sending individual snaps vs sharing your story.”
In a separate email thread, executives including Zuckerberg, Olivan, Sandberg, and Cox discussed efforts to obtain “valuable analytics” as the company was “trying to build a clone of Snapchat” (the executive who wrote the second quotation was not identified).
In August 2016, Instagram launched its stories, which are posts that disappear after 24 hours — the same core feature that Snapchat offered its users for years. Though there are obvious similarities between Snapchat’s feature and stories, Meta leadership has never admitted to directly copying its competitor.
‘The gift that keeps on giving’
According to another unsealed document, Sandberg said this in 2017 about Onavo during an interaction with Meta’s business-operations team: “Let’s take a moment to remember what a great acquisition this was. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
Although Sandberg did not mention Snapchat, she said in an earlier email that “Snapchat came up in every ads meeting and every casual ads conversation” during her trip to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum.
In a private chat from 2018, other Meta executives discussed Snapchat’s struggle to grow advertising revenue, “esp around the vertical stories ad format,” one wrote, boasting that Instagram stories would “crush” $1 billion in revenue that year. Stories quickly became a popular feature on Instagram, though Meta has never detailed how much revenue it drives.
Meta removed Onavo from app stores by 2019 over concerns that it was effectively “spyware.” Its removal from Google Play came after TechCrunch revealed it was behind Meta’s efforts to track the habits of users as young as 13.
Meta’s secret weapon
Before Onavo’s acquisition by Meta, it was a venture-backed startup that had raised about $13 million. It was hailed for its tech that compressed data on mobile phones, allowing apps to run in the background without eating up user data. Onavo also offered a way for people to track their own data usage, letting them monitor how much data they used each day to avoid being charged for overuse by data providers.
Although the app was marketed more as a way to help “people save money through more efficient use of data” and less as an analytics tool for web apps, the latter became its main service for Facebook.
In a deposition last year, Olivan, now Meta’s chief operating officer, said the company was “really good at market research,” citing some “some pretty unique and pretty good” capabilities and insights due to Onavo.
“That’s not something I would want competitors to know and imitate,” Olivan added.
In 2016, Stretch, who is now the chief legal officer at Etsy, said that Olivan was “hesitant to discuss Onavo publicly.”
“We certainly should not be proactively bragging about it,” Olivan replied.
Correction: April 3, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated when Onavo was removed from app stores. It was removed from Google Play in 2019 after a TechCrunch report from earlier that year but was removed from Apple’s App Store in 2018.
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