Facebook’s product paranoia in India
How is it that one of the biggest tech giants in the world has no product or engineering set-up in its largest market?
Why read this story?
Editor's note: Facebook has been in India for about 15 years. Facebook has been big in India (and vice versa) for at least 10. But in all these years, the company has never really had a tech presence in India—no product team and no engineers. This is not uncommon for internet companies based in the US that do not have either a large Indian audience or India-specific products or features. For instance, Twitter, to take another social media platform. But Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms Inc.) runs Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which have a massive combined user base here. Additionally, it has of late looked at India-specific features or India-first releases. The most striking example is WhatsApp Pay, where the company integrated the National Payments Corporation of India’s UPI payments system into the messaging app, something it fought for a long time to achieve. Instagram has also seen an India focus in some things: as we’ve noted before, this was one of the first countries where it launched its TikTok competitor Reels and the first country where the Instagram app got a …
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