Facebook's Nuclear Advantage

How Facebook spent over $100 million to keep the next big smartphone apps a secret.

Robert Galbraith / Reuters / Reuters

By Mark Zuckerberg's own admission, Facebook is now a mobile company. It used to be a website. Now, first and foremost, it's a collection of apps.

To cope with this new reality, Facebook is now willing to carve itself into countless smaller pieces, to experiment again with anonymity, and to aggressively pursue, to the tune of billions of dollars, any other company that's stealing smartphone users' attention. "In order to make these things really be able to reach their full potential," Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch , "I do think over time we're going to have to create more specific experiences." It's been called the Great Unbundling — Facebook, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, is bracing for a post-Facebook world.

This is a natural process for any large tech company — if Microsoft or Apple had never branched out, they might not still exist — but the universe in which Facebook operates is fast moving and unforgiving. Facebook, specifically, is on the prowl for the next big smartphone app, whether it comes from inside the building or not.

What Facebook hasn't talked about in its anniversary press tour is its secret weapon: At the end of last year, it quietly acquired, for over $100 million, a small Israeli firm called Onavo. The deal was announced and covered at face value: Onavo makes a popular app that cuts down on smartphone data use, and made compression technology that Facebook could use for its new Internet.org initiative, which aims to expand internet access around the world.

But in the months leading up to its acquisition, Onavo had transformed from a data-compression company into a startlingly effective analytics firm. Put bluntly, it had developed the only service that could identify, with precision, how many people were using almost any iOS app. It had amassed a sample size of over a million people, whose ongoing app usage it was able to measure directly. Onavo began to sell this data to tech companies and venture capitalists for thousands of dollars a month, and released some of it to the public for free. In its short life, the service became indispensable. "Onavo was the best," said Walt Roloson, who leads investment at Austin-based Impossible Ventures, who remembers that it was "surprisingly" close to reality. "Honestly, I haven't found a replacement," he said. "App Annie and directional services are still useful, but those aren't much better than checking the top apps [in the App Store] each day." Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures also told BuzzFeed "a number of [his] companies" used Onavo, noting, "it was a great service."

Shortly after announcing its acquisition by Facebook, Onavo discontinued its public Insights service. Then, without warning, it deleted the entire Insights subdomain from its site, removing scores of blog posts and previously available free data. A Google search for "Onavo Insights" turns up a field of dead links and Google ads for "replacements"; numerous blog posts and tweets linking to Onavo data are now broken.

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