Onavo

» see onavo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard the name onavo was the january 2019 facebook research scandal, when techcrunch reported that facebook was paying teenagers twenty dollars a month to install a research vpn on their phones. by then onavo had already been a facebook product for over five years. the pitch on the public app was a free vpn called onavo protect that promised to save your mobile data and warn you about risky websites. that was not what the app was for.

onavo started in israel in 2010, built by guy rosen and roi tiger. the founding pitch was mobile bandwidth compression, a real problem back when carrier data was expensive and 3g was the ceiling on most phones. the compression trick required routing traffic through onavo's own servers, which meant the company had a live view of exactly which apps everyone with the app installed was using. that data was the actual product from very early on.

facebook bought onavo on 13 october 2013 for about one hundred twenty million dollars. the acquisition was mostly ignored in the tech press because it looked like a small analytics deal. the strategic use was more brutal. onavo let facebook watch which competitor apps were gaining users at what rate, so mark zuckerberg could see whatsapp's growth curve before anyone else did. that data went into the recommendation to buy whatsapp in 2014 for nineteen billion dollars.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

inside facebook the internal codename for the onavo project during the snapchat pursuit was project ghostbusters. the engineering ask was whether onavo could see into snapchat's ssl encrypted traffic so facebook could measure snapchat usage numbers, which snapchat was famously refusing to release. some version of that project ran for years and the details eventually surfaced in later antitrust discovery and a class action lawsuit that meta settled in 2024.

the public consumer app was always a way to grow the sample size. the more people ran onavo protect on their phone, the better facebook's competitor tracking got. the trade-off was that facebook could read the metadata on every request the phone made, encrypted or not, because the vpn tunnel terminated on facebook's servers. the free vpn was the free lunch that got you sold to.

~ what it became ~

apple pulled onavo protect from the ios app store in august 2018 for violating a policy against apps collecting information about other apps on the device. facebook kept the android version running for a few more months and quietly rebranded the same underlying code as facebook research, paid users to install it, then got caught in the techcrunch story in january 2019. apple revoked facebook's enterprise developer certificate for a day in retaliation. the onavo brand did not survive that noise.

facebook shut onavo down on 21 february 2019. no farewell, no data export. the founders both stayed inside facebook. guy rosen ran the integrity org for years and became a vp of the whole company. the technology piece went into internal meta analytics dashboards where it kept working the same way it had at the start, just without a consumer-facing app on top of it. the brand disappeared, which was the point of shutting it down under that name.

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