An analytics app Meta acquired a decade ago turned into a major source of inspiration for product and business decisions, including its work to "clone" Snapchat. Rosen is Meta's chief information security officer, while Tiger was vice president of engineering until he left Meta 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 an ongoing lawsuit. After the acquisition, Facebook found through Onavo's data on messaging apps that Snapchat was a top five mobile app and WhatsApp had begun to outpace Facebook Messenger. The company was hailed for its tech that compressed data on mobile phones, allowing apps to run in the background without eating up user data.

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Persons: Guy Rosen, Roi Tiger, Rosen, Tiger, Onavo, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Mike Schroepfer, Chris Cox, Javier Olivan, Sandberg, Olivan, Cox, Facebook's, Colin Stretch, WhatsApp, Zuckerberg, Instagram, Snapchat, Stretch, Kali Hays Organizations: Meta, Facebook, Business, Onavo, YouTube, Olivan, TechCrunch Locations: Onavo, Davos, khays@insider.com