I do see a theoretical difference, but in reality there’s no guarantee that they don’t ship AB testing in the ipa/apk and do it at runtime. In fact, everything points to them doing exactly that already. By running a closed source medsenger client with a closed backend service, they have the power to say “WhatsApp off, use messenger now” if they want to- and they don’t need to push a client update to do so. I’m not concerned about meta having root access to my device - they already have access to my contacts for messaging, all ny message data (I’m in Europe, WhatsApp is my default communication method),Bluetooth and WiFi settings because you need it for location stuff. They have the data, and the permissions already. The only thing they can’t do is install another app (which I would have to grant the permissions WhatsApp already has) to do the nasty, but they can just do the nasty in the app I’m already running.