> With the new WhatsApp interface mandated by the DMA, any BirdyChat user in the EEA will be able to start a chat with any WhatsApp user in the region simply by knowing their phone number.
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.
prmoustache 14 hours ago [-]
> any WhatsApp user in the region
The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
hei-lima 14 hours ago [-]
In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common.
I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.
The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.
stef25 4 hours ago [-]
> SMS
Here in EU you pay for that. Soon as you send an image, you get charged extra. Completely useless compared to Whatsapp
abanana 9 minutes ago [-]
SMS is text only. If you're sending an image, you're not using SMS, you're using MMS.
There are phone deals that include unlimited SMS messages, but not MMS.
franga2000 4 hours ago [-]
Here in EU even the 5 €/month phone plans have unlimited SMS. As soon as you want to talk to someone without Whatsapp, you need to figure out which other apps they're on. Completely useless compared to SMS
Have you considered that the EU isn't one country?
thedonncha 4 hours ago [-]
In Ireland on my otherwise very generous mobile phone account I'm charged for multimedia SMS texts. They're not included in my SMS bundle.
B1FIDO 3 hours ago [-]
Multimedia "texts" are actually MMS. In fact, if you send more than 160 characters, those are also MMS because it's an extension of the SMS standard.
It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically download and appear immediately, due to bandwidth and resource constraints.
WesolyKubeczek 3 hours ago [-]
Aren’t SMS that are over 160 characters being concatenated? There used to be a standard for that.
AnssiH 1 hours ago [-]
Generally yes.
I guess a phone/app could exist that does convert to MMS instead, though, since the app can make that decision.
thevillagechief 13 hours ago [-]
Whatsapp is more popular in the US than you'd think. Probably due to a large immigrant population. I'm in several groups that use the channels feature to organize things like soccer, game nights etc. Most people with family abroad use Whatsapp, and that's a huge portion of the US.
nozzlegear 13 hours ago [-]
SMS isn't widespread in the US, iMessage is.
B1FIDO 1 hours ago [-]
SMS is very widespread in the United States.
All the B2C services I work with are sending SMS to my phone. Not RCS, not iMessage: they are sending SMS messages.
All the MFA providers, such as Twilio and Okta, are sending SMS.
All the political campaign spammers are sending SMS.
All the reminders for appointments and bills are sending SMS.
All the notifications for apps where Push isn't good enough: they're sending SMS.
If user-to-user communication is using iMessage then that is fine. I have noticed that only about 2 of my human contacts use RCS, and at least 2 of them are using iPhones and not Androids for it. So that's some anecdata for ya!
xvedejas 11 hours ago [-]
It all depends on age group in my experience. My friends all a bit older than me prefer Messenger for everything. My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. I think my parents and their generation use iMessage, but I use WhatsApp with them. My generation used to use snapchat a lot, I think, but I never got on that boat.
nozzlegear 8 hours ago [-]
> My friends all younger than me prefer Discord.
That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over discord.
Given its popularity among gamers of all nationalities, I wonder where discord stacks up in relation to the EU's DMA?
miki123211 4 hours ago [-]
Discord is popping up as shadow IT in some places. Because of all the server admin stuff (bot APIs, Github bots, pretty advanced RBAC etc), it's basically "Slack but for free, and without the annoying SSO."
efreak 3 hours ago [-]
Being pseudonymous doesn't prevent you from using it to contact people you actually know offline. I used Steam to talk with my group members about a project in college a couple times. Other times I used Google chat/talk/whatever it was called at the time (embedded in the browser inbox). I had a flip phone at the time, so pretty much anything I could use on desktop was easier.
joe_mamba 14 hours ago [-]
>The regional limit makes it pretty much useless.
Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.
neves 10 hours ago [-]
Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.
It's not a technical problem. It's a political one
speleding 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.
The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).
ForHackernews 1 hours ago [-]
Email has solved that problem already.
fooker 5 hours ago [-]
> It's not a technical problem
How do you do encryption?
zrm 5 hours ago [-]
A probable implementation is that you bootstrap the initial key exchange using web PKI (if you want to talk to Alice@example.com then your client makes a TLS connection to example.com and asks for Alice's public key) and thereafter you use something like the Signal ratchet thing.
lazide 4 hours ago [-]
That technical solution is significant and unsolved. I don’t think it would likely work without some major new standards either.
catoc 3 hours ago [-]
Serving 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least
Grimblewald 14 hours ago [-]
Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
There's one. It's Signal. I keep telling people to use it and they keep not, because people are less likely to do things if they've been told they should do them.
j1elo 4 hours ago [-]
To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.
I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
mhitza 10 minutes ago [-]
BTW Signal has a backup feature in the client (beta). Though can't say more about how it works since its a feature I do not need.
jhasse 3 hours ago [-]
Signal is so much worse than WhatsApp from a UX perspective. Backup sync forces you to allow background permissions (WhatsApp doesn't), you have to set and get nagged to enter a PIN every few weeks (WhatsApp doesn't), there's no transcription for audio messages (WhatsApp has that for some languages), the desktop app loses its connection if you don't open it ever few weeks (WhatsApp works fine), etc.
If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.
maqp 1 hours ago [-]
>If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.
Why would people switch from always-end-to-end encrypted group chats to never-end-to-end encrypted group chats?
expedition32 9 minutes ago [-]
My circle switched to Signal because we are concerned about tech bros and a fascist America.
Boosting Russia is not the solution.
6 hours ago [-]
swiftcoder 5 hours ago [-]
Without interoperability with the chat platform all the regular people are already using, that's always going to be an uphill battle.
I use Signal to communicate with other tech folks, but good luck convincing your dentist/doctor/etc to send reminders on signal instead of WhatsApp.
sunshowers 5 hours ago [-]
I talk to one of my doctors over Signal.
xmcp123 12 hours ago [-]
Everybody says this until there’s an alternative.
There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
zarzavat 12 hours ago [-]
The alternatives suck.
WhatsApp strikes a good balance of usability and security. Telegram is too insecure (no E2E by default). Signal is too secure (no chat exports).
Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp, even without the network effects.
bornfreddy 5 hours ago [-]
Signal allows you to do local chat export for backup, as opposed to WhatsApp (which only allows backup to Google account on android). That's actually my biggest complaint against WhatsApp and Viber: why don't you allow local backup, or backup to something I control?
j1elo 4 hours ago [-]
Correction, in case you're interested: Whatsapp does (and has always done) allow local file backups. I know because they are just there on the storage:
Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/
I also know because for many years I was VERY cloud-averse so for several iterations of smartphone purchases I did migrate my chat backups between phones (plain copy-paste of files with a computer) without issues.
tonyhart7 11 hours ago [-]
You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"
expedition32 9 hours ago [-]
Besides what WhatsApp does on a technical level can be fairly easily replicated.
Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.
zarzavat 1 hours ago [-]
If it's so easy to replicate, why isn't there any other app that has replicated it?
Signal is the closest but they fall short because they prioritize privacy over features. Which is their choice to make, but it means they have ruled themselves out from going mainstream. If you're not targeting feature parity with WhatsApp then you have zero chance of supplanting it.
Telegram prioritises idk the FSB spying on your chats, that app gives me the creeps.
chii 7 hours ago [-]
> But that is marketing not coding.
it's the network effect.
If normies who don't care for things (which is most people tbh) don't decide to switch, do you, as a techie/early adopter, just turn off whatsapp and disconnect with your normie friends? You are unlikely to be important enough in the friend group to force a switch, not to mention that this needs to happen enmass for a swing in the network effect to happen.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
Being implacably stubborn is underrated. People can trivially have two messaging apps on their phone, which means they can all still contact you while using WhatsApp with other people. Then they all slowly end up with Signal on their phone, at which point who needs WhatsApp at all?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
arter45 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, you can have two messaging apps, but people will have a “main app” which is typically the one used by important people in their life (family, partner,…) and/or the one used by most people. Meanwhile, if you all use two apps, everytime you want to check up on a friend you have to check two apps.
Imagine all your friends love pizza, as do you.
Suddenly you decide sushi is better so, naturally, you tell your friends to try out sushi at the next dinner.
Assuming some of your friends are not absolutely against sushi, yes, you’ll have that sushi dinner. But what if they don’t like it that much? They will revert to pizza or accept sushi, occasionally, when they want to see you, while still prefering pizza for all other interactions.
There has to be a perceived advantage for changing habits. If few people see the benefits of Signal or other non-Whatsapp apps, they will not change their minds.
chii 2 hours ago [-]
> Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
and only those who actually succeed being unreasonable is remembered. The other unreasonable people simply get forgotten or ignored - the vast majority.
computerfriend 10 hours ago [-]
Signal has exports.
neves 10 hours ago [-]
Which non hacker news user exports chats?
I'm the only person I know who ever did it.
popol12 7 hours ago [-]
They released cloud backups recently and I believe they are also working on manual exports on iOS too
Scarblac 13 hours ago [-]
There is an ongoing move from Whatsapp to Signal. It's just very slow.
anonzzzies 12 hours ago [-]
I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.
I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).
maqp 1 hours ago [-]
>working on all devices makes it very nice.
Signal has end-to-end encryption working on all devices.
Telegram doesn't because they're amateurs.
anonzzzies 52 minutes ago [-]
I didn't say Signal did not and obviously Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat. So what do you mean?
Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.
maqp 1 minutes ago [-]
>Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat
You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.
>I guess you are from Ukraine?
Nope.
>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly
The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.
When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.
joe_mamba 13 hours ago [-]
You realize that at the end of your sentence you've contradicted everything you've said from the start until that point, right?
Maybe it was tongue in cheek and I missed it.
kelvinjps10 11 hours ago [-]
It's not really about that but more that other countries start regulating the same way as WhatsApp and that way not all people would switch to these apps but they would have the opportunity to use it and keep talking with their friends and family
zjaffee 5 hours ago [-]
I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.
krzyk 5 hours ago [-]
It is an unique feature.
Most people communicate with the ones in their region. Even when going on vacation most people can afford only to travel around their own continent.
miki123211 4 hours ago [-]
"on your own Continent" != "in the EU."
Ukraine isn't in the EU, neither is Swicerland, Norway or, most famously, the UK. All of these are on the European continent, all of these have citizens living right near a border with an EU country and regularly having to communicate with the EU side.
bambax 6 hours ago [-]
> pretty much useless
To you maybe. Not everyone has overseas contacts.
swiftcoder 5 hours ago [-]
> Not everyone has overseas contacts
It's not really the "overseas" usecase that is the sticking point for many businesses.
Does your business in Spain ever need to message Brits who are there on holiday? Does your business in Greece ever have customers who drive across the border from Albania?
yapyap 2 hours ago [-]
> The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
… useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.
dfajgljsldkjag 17 hours ago [-]
It's better than nothing. If you have a different app and want to talk to your friend who uses whatsapp it's much easier to convince him to toggle a setting than to download a different app.
echelon 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
drnick1 14 hours ago [-]
It's because the real solution here is to move away from this proprietary malware to protocols that are open, so that anyone can write or fork a client. (For instance, see Molly for a fully Ungoogled Signal.)
It's difficult when it comes to messengers, but reasonably easy when it comes to Google and Android, for which good alternatives exist (e.g., DuckDuck on GrapheneOS.)
ronsor 16 hours ago [-]
> Or worse - you have a nice trademark for your business or product, and google managed to turn 91% of "URL bars" through "web standards" and unilateral control / anti-competitive practices, turn these into "Google search". You type in Anthropic and instead of seeing their homepage, you see ads for ChatGPT. 50% of Google's revenue is trademark taxation.
This is preposterous. You'd see ads for Gemini, not ChatGPT.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
That depends which group is offering more money today. Gemini is integrated into the search and comes before any results so it might not need any ads.
philipallstar 2 hours ago [-]
What web standard is this?
jstummbillig 17 hours ago [-]
> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing.
And so do the courts. Give them some time to cook. How goes the popular American saying: We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.
Nextgrid 16 hours ago [-]
> Give them some time to cook
How long? I'm still waiting for the GDPR to actually be enforced meaningfully.
gf000 15 hours ago [-]
You can get some really hefty fines for not playing by the rules. It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe. It's not enforced hard enough against US company empires like meta and the like unfortunately, but it absolutely works.
Nextgrid 14 hours ago [-]
Can != will.
> It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe
Yeah, like every single cookie banner out there not actually being compliant. A regulation can't be considered to be meaningfully enforced when every single storefront openly breaches it in total impunity for years.
reedciccio 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah... Ask Schrems about the hefty fines and all that pretty things bright to Europeans by the GDPR. Come on! The GDPR is at best a pretty face to a rotten nothing-burger.
pastage 11 hours ago [-]
Not full filling your wishes can still mean useful. Be very specific when you critize the only set of laws that has done anything for users.
jstummbillig 15 hours ago [-]
How is it not enforced "meaningfully"? (I don't know what is meaningful to you)
It's several years old by now but nothing has changed. It is still more profitable to breach the GDPR than to comply with it.
echelon 16 hours ago [-]
How long?
Lina Khan didn't move fast enough, then she was shown the door.
Maybe the EU will persist where the US FTC/DOJ could not?
_3u10 14 hours ago [-]
Nah it’s privacy. Gotta get consent from users. Cookies, GDPR, and all. Meta has learned from their fines, and isn’t opting users automatically into features.
irishcoffee 16 hours ago [-]
> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing.
Wait, you mean passing feel-good legislation has knock-on effects? Who would have thought?
TeMPOraL 15 hours ago [-]
It's not a case of "feel-good legislation", but yeah, this reaction was to be expected. Meta and most other SaaS companies are user-hostile on purpose, not by accident, so it's predictable they'll try to fight it.
irishcoffee 10 hours ago [-]
That's fair. By feel-good I meant, passing something without trying to see how this would be the reaction. Just put a tiny bit more thought into the edge cases for exploitation. Don't rush it for the moral victory, have cake and eat it too.
schubidubiduba 15 hours ago [-]
That is not the case here. The legislation has been drafted with all of this in mind, and will force Meta to continually improve until the feature is like it should be.
Without Trump making a huge fuss everytime US companies have to do something that can hurt their monopolies, we'd probably already be there
thisislife2 17 hours ago [-]
Could you clarify - What has been implemented as opt-in by WhatsApp to act as a hurdle?
odo1242 17 hours ago [-]
Receiving message requests from third-party users. So you have to get the person you know to flip a toggle before they get the message.
thisislife2 17 hours ago [-]
Is this a per-contact setting or a "universal" one?
progval 3 hours ago [-]
It's universal, but you need to whitelist specific apps people can message you from. This is what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/0gKY76z.png
zeeZ 17 hours ago [-]
It's a universal setting. You have to enable it per third-party app, though. You get to choose whether you want to see them listed with WhatsApp chats or in a separate folder
odo1242 17 hours ago [-]
Account-wide. Though you can only turn it on in Europe.
benj111 17 hours ago [-]
When you say Europe you mean the EU? I'm not seeing an option in the UK. (Yay Brexit)
riffraff 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's the EU, this is a result of the DMA regulation. I suppose the British government could enact a similar regulation tho.
dfajgljsldkjag 17 hours ago [-]
Each whatsapp user needs to enable the setting once to allow chats with multiple number of third party users.
InsideOutSanta 14 hours ago [-]
Yep, 100% malicious compliance on Meta's part. I hope they get punished for this.
mlrtime 10 hours ago [-]
How so exactly? They can say they are keeping conversations secure from 3rd parties.
sagarm 7 hours ago [-]
That doesn't make sense -- the parties to the conversation already _have_ the messages.
Spam prevention is a likely angle, however. EU should force it to be opt-out, not opt-in -- probably what people want anyway.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 14 hours ago [-]
How the opt-in is considered acceptable, that's a toothless resolution
tonyhart7 11 hours ago [-]
because its EU only ????? you want it to be enabled by default while only certain amount of people want to use it
Fire-Dragon-DoL 11 hours ago [-]
Is it auto enabled on eu phones? If not, to ne it's not compliant
zoobab 5 hours ago [-]
"opt-in"
FAIL
moffkalast 2 hours ago [-]
I thought the stupid name was enough to kill it tbh. I'm not telling anyone they can call me on "birdychat" lmao.
lpcvoid 38 minutes ago [-]
While I also don't think Birdychat is a good name, you could also argue that "Whatsapp" is a weird name for an app billions of people use.
dmitrygr 14 hours ago [-]
I understand my agreement with WhatsApp - i read it and all. I have no agreement with that other app. I do not know what they would do with my data. Until they give me a privacy policy and i approve it, they indeed should have none of my data. Opt-in is the correct solution.
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant (that app is European and thus must care about GDPR). They do not have my permission to have/handle my private data, and GDPR does not allow WhatAspp to hand it over without my permission either... My name (which whatsapp exposes simply with my phone number) is considered PII under GDPR and
lxgr 14 hours ago [-]
What a strange way to think about a telecommunications service. By the same logic, shouldn’t there be a privacy policy for regular old phone lines? Who knows which third parties are between you and the person on the other end!
And speaking about the other end: I have bad news about all the data you share with untrustworthy contacts on WhatsApp…
Quite practically, anyone that enables backups (which WhatsApp heavily nudges people to do) uploads a copy of all your messages and media sent to them to a cloud provider you have no privacy agreement with.
dmitrygr 13 hours ago [-]
old telephone lines did not disclose info about me with merely my phone number. whataspp discloses name, picture, status
As for your second comment, updated first comment with:
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant if that app is European. They do not have my permission to have my private data, and GDPR does not allow whatAspp to hand it over without my permission either...
dotancohen 8 hours ago [-]
> old telephone lines did not disclose info about me with merely my phone number.
Old telephone lines most certainly disclosed additional information about you. Who you contacted, when, how often.
Did you call that drug dealer every Tuesday evening? Looks suspicious. Did that criminal call you the day before he robbed a store not far from your home? Looks suspicious. Do you call Pakistan twice a week? Looks suspicious. Have you ever called a suicide prevention hotline? A bank other than your own? A mosque? An independent political party?
Your POTS phone was always revealing information.
lxgr 13 hours ago [-]
> whataspp discloses name, picture, status
Only to who you choose to make it available to. And if you choose “everybody”, I don’t see how you can reasonably expect this to mean “everybody not using third-party software”?
mlrtime 10 hours ago [-]
Because I don't chose everybody? I don't want everyone to see my information, why would I?
inexcf 2 hours ago [-]
Man there's a rising amount of people who don't understand hypotheticals.
How can you think that your comment "...I don't chose everybody?" is a valid answer to "If you chose everybody..." ?
dmitrygr 13 hours ago [-]
Because until today that IS what it meant! Are you claiming that "pray i do not change the deal further" is a sane approach?
lxgr 13 hours ago [-]
I just don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation of a telecommunications tool, so yeah, I think it’s a fair change well within the norms and expectations of an instant messenger.
You should get to control how/ to whom your data is distributed, but also requiring these recipients to only use software and services of your choosing seems excessive. Platform lock-in at this point seems like the much greater harm.
I could see the case for a small indicator in the contact details that they’re using a third-party client, but anything more (green bubbles?) would be counterproductive.
mlrtime 10 hours ago [-]
It's not requiring, thats the point of BirdyChat, right? You just have to opt-in to use it.
dmitrygr 12 hours ago [-]
i did not ask for green bubbles, nor did whatsapp implement that. they let me opt-in to communicate with questionable clients and i am here for it.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
The recipient is already using third-party code. I am using a Samsung OS, which is not from Meta, to see your messages. Do you object to this? I also have the YouTube PiP overlay layer in front of your messages.
sagarm 7 hours ago [-]
That is Zuck's usual MO, so why not apply it when it's not to his advantage?
xmcp123 12 hours ago [-]
Old telephones had caller ID. They would send your name and company.
You did have to initiate the call, but you still didn’t have any kind of agreement about it.
mlrtime 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, and you used to have to pay for it! Not only was it opt-in, there was a charge.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
Several people have scraped every possible phone number from WhatsApp so they know your name, picture, and status if they want it.
mlrtime 10 hours ago [-]
So, that doesn't mean we give it away freely because someone was malicious. That makes no sense.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
It's already given away freely. Anyone who has WhatsApp can add you as a contact and see this information.
If you are bored and have a computer, you can add every possible phone number as a contact. Not many people do that, but some did.
raverbashing 4 hours ago [-]
> as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side
Chatting with anyone has always been opt in from the point of the receiver, so I don't get your point?
urbandw311er 3 hours ago [-]
> any BirdyChat user
And how many of these are there? Anyone?
marcocastignoli 2 hours ago [-]
Data BirdyChat collects:
> Messages, attachments and other materials that you send through BirdyChat to your contacts;
No thanks
rbbydotdev 30 minutes ago [-]
USA, which prides itself on freedoms, seems to have conceded a great deal of them when it comes to life online. From Apple apps, GPDR, now this. It sucks to see what we are missing out on.
j1elo 3 hours ago [-]
I'd like to take the opportunity to mention a tiny very useful app that allows opening a WhatsApp chat directly with any number, without having to register it first as a contact. Great for vacations or similar situations where a quick one-time chat is needed with somebody:
I'm just grateful for this app, so I thought that maybe other HNers might find it useful.
tngranados 3 hours ago [-]
Since some time ago, you can type the number directly in the search bar and it would let you message it, at least on iOS
Kwpolska 2 hours ago [-]
Same on Android.
my_throwaway23 16 hours ago [-]
While not a commercial offering, which is what this is saying in reality - closed source, commercial alternative with (limited) interoperability, I've been running my own chat server for a while now with (limited) interoperability with both Whatsapp and Messenger.
I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice, and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don't exist yet AFAIK, and they're truly game-changers. Will that change? Does the DMA mention anything other than chat? Perhaps someone could enlighten me.
thebiblelover7 12 hours ago [-]
How have you been running it? How did you make it interoperable?
my_throwaway23 11 hours ago [-]
I'm using Element Synapse with the Mautrix bridges. They're all a pain to setup, with a ton of required configuration options each, but once setup, it's mostly transparent where any one chat originates. Reactions, emojis, media, it all just works.
The downside, of course, is that voice and video will not work.
Oh, and perhaps a ton of initial invitations, one for every conversation you have open.
There are open servers you can join, with the bridges enabled, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose. At that point you might as well use a commercial, closed-source offering, as, ironically, a corporation with a large footprint you can sue. Average Joe with an AWS instance you might not be able to track down, should your data leak.
Would be interesting to hear how it works what you have built.
Edit: Saw your other comment now.
my_throwaway23 7 hours ago [-]
Frankly I didn't "build" anything. It was mostly just a case of setting up the docker scripts, make sure the volumes have proper permissions and the configuration is sane. The configuration though, I'll take all the credit in the world for wading through, haha. These are not software with opinions included.
jeena 6 hours ago [-]
My Main Problem is To keep the bridges up to date. I just switched my phone number in WhatsApp and Signal and that lead to a huge ton of trouble for my bridges. After a month of fiddling with it, deleting things, updating, logging in and out of accounts and puppets, I still don't get any messages from signal into element. While it was working for years just fine it gives me the most trouble now that my dad is in the hospital in another country and I have to coordinate with my siblings a lot.
zahirbmirza 12 hours ago [-]
From their page
"Built for better conversations
Reach people with their email, not their phone number. Designed for focused, meaningful exchanges between managers, builders, and collaborators."
Is it using email protocols to send messages or is it using email addresses as a proxy for usernames?
The claim of a drive for better conversations is not really that accurate because better conversations rely on a more universally used app/system than presently exists. Ie, a replacement that would have to grow internationally extraordinarily quickly.
Apple figured that out... iMessage was basically a cheat code to a vast userbase almost instantly. What Apple didn't figure, however, was that iMessage's green/blue thingy that went on for so long didn't really give android/sms users fomo, but really, it just created an unneeded communication barrier. Such barriers are the exact opposite of what is needed for a communication platform to be excellent. Unfortunately, decisions counter to what may be perceived as income generating are difficult to reverse.
These sorts of apps may not be revolutionary enough I fear. I would love to adopt something like this, but Meta continue to make too many billions to let their monopoly on human communication management to be taken away that easily.
aduwah 16 hours ago [-]
I was a big fan of pidgin, but this premise makes me feel iffy.
Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own.
Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day.
Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion
swiftcoder 5 hours ago [-]
> this premise makes me feel iffy. Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging?
I think the pitch here is exactly the opposite of that? Many businesses in the EU already use WhatsApp for customer contact - this lets you separate your business communications from the app you use for personal messaging
maqp 15 hours ago [-]
The unfortunate problem with Pidgin is you don't have proper cross-platform E2EE chats, especially for groups. OTR is terribly outdated with its 1536-bit FFDH. These days the security margin sits at 2048-bit minimum, 3072-bit recommended. OMEMO might work but it's just not a standard. Good thing Signal made the whole thing just work.
Bender 15 hours ago [-]
Surely there must be someone capable of and willing to update OTR to support the latest PQC encryption protocols and ciphers. OTR is the only semi-trustable model of E2EE I have ever seen. Anything managed by the same platform managing the communication is dead in the water for me.
Nice. I think I left around the time gchat dropped XMPP support. Is google chat supported to any extent these days?
bruce343434 11 hours ago [-]
Never heard of this before. Why would I use this? I am assuming the messages are not actually encrypted, because on their own privacy page they state that they "process" messages and attachments sent through birdychat. So are they processing the raw unencrypted data on their servers or what?
From a cursory glance of their CSAE policy, combined with the above, it seems they would be very eager to comply with the dreaded "chat control".
It is very possible that they process messages in the client app, before sending them.
WhatsApp does the same: have you noticed how the photos you receive have a debatable quality? Presumably (and hopefully) the sender's app downscaled them before e2e encryption.
bruce343434 27 minutes ago [-]
From this it seems that whatsapp interop requires you to pass a url of the media, not the actual encrypted media. Aside from TLS, I'm not sure what encryption you get for attachments
On the main page it states clearly that messages are e2e encrypted. So all they can collect is metadata.
jordemort 14 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty resentful that people in the US are stuck using worse/less featureful versions of products from US companies, while the government in Europe can get these kinds of concessions for their people. If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well, since we can't be bothered otherwise to pass any of these nice laws for ourselves. See also: choice in app stores
qubex 12 hours ago [-]
It can go both ways: for example in the EU Apple disallows mirroring of iPhones on Macs because of its interpretation of EU statutes, though it occurred at the same time as they were required to support third-party app stores, so I strongly suspect it was a bit of ‘FU’ to the EU.
But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
And Apple does this while also ignoring the rule about third–party app stores — they are not supported.
That’s because your government aligns itself with businesses, not consumers.
> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well
This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.
0xDEAFBEAD 9 hours ago [-]
> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well
The obvious implication of the above statement is that the US government should force the company to do this.
>This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have.
When Americans ask their government for the exact same thing that Europeans asked their government for, suddenly Europeans think Americans are "entitled". There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".
hsbauauvhabzb 6 hours ago [-]
No, their statement was ‘if another country gets it, I should get it too’. That’s not the same as ‘I long for the privacy benefits offered to Europeans and actively write to my government representatives to request it’. It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.
At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.
0xDEAFBEAD 5 hours ago [-]
"X should do Y" is common phrasing Americans use to talk about US public policy.
>It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.
It was once believed that privacy is a right that all humans share, and should be advanced for everyone. Modern scholars understand that this view is mistaken. Privacy is a privilege (your word, not mine!) that Europeans earned through their refined culture and discernment. Us Americans will need to catch up in terms of ancient ruins, cheese, and multilingualism in order to earn the the same privilege that Europe has by birthright =)
>At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.
Was this statement intended to disprove my claim that 'There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".'?
hsbauauvhabzb 3 hours ago [-]
America has eroded and treated privacy not as a right, not as a privilege, but as nothing. It has been doing this more and more blatantly across the world for the past 2 years and has now become an authoritarian state, threatening war across the globe while simultaneously destabilising the global economy. America IS bad, for multiple reasons.
0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago [-]
So why are you so angry at jordemort trying to push back?
mlrtime 10 hours ago [-]
And you don't have to use any of it, feel free to stop tomorrow.
wswin 14 hours ago [-]
Let's not pretend they would do this if the tech monopolies were european.
lxgr 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, the EU would never dare to regulate European companies, for example require banks to offer free and instant person-to-person money transfers or mobile phone operators to offer data roaming at domestic rates.
seec 49 minutes ago [-]
The only reason we have that is because fintech is eating the meal of traditional banks.
They came up with ways to transfer with just a card (which benefits Visa and Mastercard, US companies) and do inter-account instant transfers for free.
SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card).
Brussels rarely works for the little people; they just support whatever the big players at the moment want, unless they are foreign and can come up with a reason to tax them.
It is delusional to think politicians in Brussels care about the little guys; it is always about maintaining or gaining power, otherwise they wouldn't come up with absurd regulations that hit the small players much harder than any of the big ones.
12 hours ago [-]
cromka 13 hours ago [-]
Let's not pretend you ever bothered to check if that's actually true
12 hours ago [-]
colinprince 16 hours ago [-]
This five-month-old comment suggests that birdychat uses telegram, pivot maybe?
It would have been more effective to require Meta (and all other messaging companies) to implement an open protocol or open source theirs, so that people can freely write alternative clients free of malware.
uyzstvqs 11 hours ago [-]
A custom API is the only way for a platform to extend its native E2EE sessions and features to other platforms. Making those APIs completely open would become a major spam problem, which would likely end them up in the same situation as SMTP, where small servers are blocked-by-default by big providers.
Interoperability by agreement between legitimate messaging services, using custom APIs is the only realistic and secure way to accomplish this.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
But WhatsApp is already completely open for spammers. They can use the secret API or screen-scrape WhatsApp itself.
uyzstvqs 1 hours ago [-]
WhatsApp bans spam pretty quickly. Unfiltered spam is much, much worse.
didip 14 hours ago [-]
The sky might as well rains toads before this happens.
AFAIK it's Signal with proprietary extensions, so it's effectively closed.
poisonborz 17 hours ago [-]
Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.
Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.
input_sh 17 hours ago [-]
Correct! This is just Meta doing malicious compliance by being "compatible" with companies with no actual product, three-months old waitlist, no actual users within the EU, and nobody to push back on WhatsApp's definition of interoperability. Then when some real product tries to actually become interoperable down-the-line, Meta's gonna be like "well these two did it just fine according to this backwards implementation, why can't you?"
They're both b2b products that are gonna try to find their first users by pitching the idea that you can use their products to spam WhatsApp users.
Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. Here, let me save you a click: https://haiket.com/press/release-nov11.html
> Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.
lurk2 16 hours ago [-]
> Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. […] Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.
How does this imply he has any connection to Meta? Companies license patents all the time.
input_sh 16 hours ago [-]
Okay, what about three sentences above that one?
> Before Haiket, Alex founded a number of technology start-ups and helped develop innovative voice solutions for Facebook and Google.
At the very least, I think it's safe to say he has some connections within Meta that he utilised for this purpose. He's definitely not a complete outsider whose startup (with no actual product) just happened to be picked by Meta.
lurk2 16 hours ago [-]
> what about three sentences above that one?
My bad. I searched for “Meta” instead of “Facebook.” Quite a few other red flags in that press release.
> Haiket is launching the Beta trial from today, with a pipeline of future innovation for early adopters, including a pioneering silencing technology that will allow users to speak privately in public, with voice communication that only your device can hear.
scns 15 hours ago [-]
>> including a pioneering silencing technology that will allow users to speak privately in public, with voice communication that only your device can hear.
Does anyone else think this sounds beyond ridiculous?
londons_explore 15 hours ago [-]
> voice communication that only your device can hear.
This is fairly straightforward - you have the device spew out noise with similar characteristics to human speech (ie. random overlapping syllables in the speaker's voice). Take a recording then subtract the random syllables.
Only your device can do the subtraction, because only your device knows the waveform it transmitted.
Obviously in a room with lots of reverb this will be a bit harder, since you will also need to subtract the reflection of what was transmitted with a room profile and deal with the phone moving in the room, but it sounds far from impossible.
wizzwizz4 15 hours ago [-]
Countermeasure: set up four microphones some distance apart, use autocorrelation to pinpoint the sound sources, and then isolate them, recovering the "masked" speech. The countercountermeasure would be to fully surround your mouth and vocal tract with an active noise cancelling system and then produce noise (to push whatever little sound gets through far below the noise floor: the signal is unpredictable enough that you can't use averaging techniques to recover it). The countercountercountermeasure would be to use a camera in the radio band to look at the vocal tract directly, using the phone as a light source, and recover the phonemes that way. The countercountercountercountermeasure would be to construct an isolated box… at which point you're no longer having a voice call in public: you have a portable privacy booth.
zimpenfish 14 hours ago [-]
> you have the device spew out noise with similar characteristics to human speech
Surely this only works if you're using the phone as a speakerphone (and are therefore almost certainly being an arsehole in public[0])?
[0] Because if it was an actual speakerphone situation, hiding your voice would be stupid.
huflungdung 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kubb 16 hours ago [-]
I see a second round of legislation might be needed. They'll get it right eventually.
input_sh 16 hours ago [-]
Eh, there's no specific definition of interoperability written in the Digital Markets Act. It's decided on a case-by-case basis and I'm sure that the legislators in charge of this case will push back on this piss-poor implementation in like a year from now.
By the time this back-and-forth reaches its end, these two will find some shady b2b customers and are gonna be touted as "successful European startups".
Bratmon 16 hours ago [-]
They never got cookie popups right. What makes you so confident?
jorvi 16 hours ago [-]
They got cookie pop-ups right, current rules:
- the default choice needs to be "strictly necessary cookies
- with other less prominent buttons for "allow all" and "deny all"
- a site is not allowed to force you to have the press a bunch of buttons or select a bunch of things to deny most/all cookies
The problem lies in enforcement. Unless you are a huge player, there is almost nil chance you're gonna get fined.
I think about the only thing missing is that they should have RFC'd a standard akin to Do Not Track, except this would have communicated to sites if your default is "strictly necessary", "allow all" or"deny all". With it being set to "strictly necessary" by default.
palata 15 hours ago [-]
> The problem lies in enforcement. Unless you are a huge player, there is almost nil chance you're gonna get fined.
I am curious: why is that difficult? Define the fine as a percentage of the revenue of the company, have users report links, and pay someone to check the link and send the fine.
Sounds like easy money... I mean it's very profitable to pay people to check parking lots and fine drivers who don't follow the regulations. This should be even more profitable?
xmcp123 12 hours ago [-]
If I am business outside Europe, why would I send Europe what my revenue is?
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know — why do businesses outside Europe care about GDPR compliance at all? They could just track Europeans all they want to, without any cookie banners.
xmcp123 5 hours ago [-]
Tbh most do. It makes sense only for big companies with a multinational presence.
But admitting you are subject to the laws of a country/entity is one thing, sending them your books (when your company is not based there) is kind of on a different level
kubb 16 hours ago [-]
Optimistic. They've got sideloading done, browser and search choice done, ad transparency done, more choice for payments done, many dark patterns banned.
The gears are turning slowly, but they're doing really useful work.
blell 15 hours ago [-]
Any company can ask for interoperatibility with whatsapp. None of them are, because it's obviously against their interests.
The DMA will change nothing in this regard because the "many apps" approach is the most beneficial to users.
londons_explore 15 hours ago [-]
> because it's obviously against their interests.
Why? I'd love to be an alternative whatsapp client with all kinds of new features that the official client doesn't have. Obviously you say you're building a compatible chat network, but the reality is users are just using your client to talk to whatsapp users.
Eg. one feature I'd love is some AI to automatically take any date and time someone mentions to me and put it as a draft event in my calendar. I miss so many events from big group chats I'm not paying proper attention to and suddenly everyone is saying "Whoa, you didn't come to Johns 50th birthday?!? Why not? We invited you months ago[in a group chat with 100 messages a day of mostly memes]"
poisonborz 15 hours ago [-]
> obviously against their interests
Would love to know how it is "obviously" against my interest to make a chat app and have 3.3 billion users adressable instantly. Bad for internet health to be still tied to Meta, sure, but the damage was done and this is a way to reverse it.
blell 15 hours ago [-]
Why would you spend a lot of money to make a better app for whatsapp and let them keep all the revenue?
You won't get enough people to pay you money to use your app to make it profitable. If you think you will, then you have a business already; go build it!
poisonborz 15 hours ago [-]
> keep all the revenue
Which revenue? Whatsapp is for free, those 3.3 billion people use it for free, the revenue is the reselling of user data and showing them ads. Which they would do less with a 3rd party client, and as such Meta fights it tooth and nail.
> You won't get enough people to pay you money to use your app
It might surprise you but people build apps just for fun, free and open source for others to use, just to make the world better. Which really would be in this case, that's also the intention of this law.
nottorp 15 hours ago [-]
Well they lost me at waitlist.
rambambram 17 hours ago [-]
As a European, I would like to know in _which_ European country you're based. I think I know all of them, people from abroad might not. Saying "Made in Europe" is too general for my European liking. ;)
chatmasta 17 hours ago [-]
I'd also like to know what "based in the EEA" means:
> For interoperability to work, both you and your WhatsApp contacts need to be based in the EEA.
Does my contact phone number need to have an EEA country code? Does my current IP address need to be geolocated in the EEA? Do I need to download the two apps from a regional App Store in the EEA? Do I need to show an EEA payment method to both apps? What happens to my chats if I move or switch app stores?
usr1106 9 hours ago [-]
I agree, made in Europe, does not give enogh information. Their T&C gives the details: They are from Latvia.
I dare to claim: A majority of EU citizens know really nothing about Latvia.
altern8 17 hours ago [-]
I thought the same thing.
I also don't think there's such a thing as "made in Europe", as if it was "made in USA". Is it made in Germany, Italy, Albania..?
pbhjpbhj 16 hours ago [-]
Surely it's very similar, companies can't - AFAIK - be registered in USA, they're registered in a state. USA's States have different tax and legislative climates, just like EU states do.
It's not. Part of Russia is in Europe. The geographical limit between Europe and Asia is not well defined.
I think it would be similar to saying "First American chat app that...", which would be ambiguous?
rippeltippel 5 hours ago [-]
It Is fair to say that "Europe" is a proxy for "European Union", like "America" is usually understood as "United States of America", without any precise geographic connotation.
Their service operates in the European Economic Area, which includes more countries than the EU and is therefore closer to the European geographic surface.
altern8 15 hours ago [-]
Sure, but the U.S. are a single country, while Europe is many different countries that are completely different.
I'm in Poland and can drive 2 hours and stop understanding what people are saying to me (in German and Czech).
That was my point.
bojan 12 hours ago [-]
> while Europe is many different countries that are completely different.
I've always found this a weird take. European (EU) countries are more similar to each other than any country outside of Europe is to any European country.
In your example, if you drive two hours to Germany or Czechia, your car will still be insured, all your bank cards will still work, the price of your mobile phone service stays the same, you'll have a good idea how health and employment systems work, and the chances are you'll be able to talk to people in English.
It remains true that the barriers the businesses face are higher, but that's not what your example was about.
SahAssar 23 minutes ago [-]
> I've always found this a weird take. European (EU) countries are more similar to each other than any country outside of Europe is to any European country.
You think finland and malta are more similar to each other than sweden and norway?
retired 16 hours ago [-]
Could even be Turkey west of the Bosphorus.
They can fabricate the product in Bursa and do final assembly in West-Istanbul.
palata 15 hours ago [-]
Or Russia...
altern8 15 hours ago [-]
Correct, Russia is in both Europe and Asia.
ncruces 16 hours ago [-]
Plenty of supermarket products say made in Europe, particularly (but not only) white label products.
altern8 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe "made in the EU"..? That is not the same thing as "made in Europe".
dfxm12 16 hours ago [-]
The words aren't important. The regulated meaning is. Does it have a legal meaning? If so, what is it? Who enforces it? Consider made in Italy vs made in Germany are different in meaningful aspects.
TeMPOraL 15 hours ago [-]
Is there even a regulated meaning to "made in X"?
The way I see it, "made in Europe" may be dubious, but "made in EU" should be just as okay to write as "made in USA". And if it's not a thing, well, nothing is a thing until people make it a thing.
EDIT: also we're talking about a software product here, where most things written on the product is legally meaningless - otherwise we'd have special customs regimes for those major software exporter places like "love" and "♡".
altern8 15 hours ago [-]
I know that there is a regulated meaning—at least for food—even down to the region (Scotch, Chianti, Champagne, etc.) or even city (Modena, for balsamic vinegar), but laws aren't the same in every country.
"Made in EU" would be equivalent to "Made in USA", and I'm pretty sure it's regulated.
This is just an app though, so they can say whatever they want. I've seen "Made with love", "Made on Earth", etc.
dfxm12 15 hours ago [-]
As my comment implied, there is in some places, but the regulations aren't uniform. Also, the person I responded to mentioned supermarket products. I was asking legitimate questions & was hoping to get an informed response.
"For Europe, this is our chance to build competitive alternatives to Big Tech. But we need European-hosted infrastructure to make that possibility a reality."
Page is hosted in USA.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
I won't understand why people do that when Hetzner is so effective.
srikanthdotch 5 hours ago [-]
The thing I hate most about WhatsApp is the number of ad messages from businesses. It’s almost unusable for me. I have no option to use anything else, as all my contacts use WhatsApp and the network effects lock me in.
Semaphor 5 hours ago [-]
As someone who never got any of those, is that like cold spam messages for businesses you don’t have as contacts? And can’t you just disable messages from unknown contacts?
vlz 4 hours ago [-]
> Currently, BirdyChat supports 1:1 chats, with group chat interoperability coming in a future update.
I wondered whether it can be used with Whatsapp groups: Apprently not yet.
ksec 13 hours ago [-]
I am wondering if this opens up the possibility of having more than two WhatsApp Number on the same phone. Especially on iOS.
I have long requested this feature for Whatsapp Business, where I can pay an annual subscription just to have more than one number. So I can separate life between Business and Friends.
augusto-moura 12 hours ago [-]
I think you can do it on pure Androids that can have more than 1 SIM card, you need to have an Android profile for each and have both sim cards in the same phone.
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
Nexus used to support unlimited profiles for the whole phone including every app, Samsung phones don't.
shevy-java 14 hours ago [-]
That name isn't that great ...
WhatsApp is not a great name either, but catchy and somewhat simple.
BirdyPo.. I mean BirdyChat sounds like when doves cry. But not as catchy.
Also, I am all in favour of Europeans becoming less dependent on the USA (yet-another-ICE-killing incident today, with video footage contradicting the claims made by the current government - again), but there is kind of ... a weak decision-making process here. Lobbyists sell to Europeans that Amazon data servers in Europe, now comply with european laws. Well, those are still external companies that will hand over data from europeans, so that is not a solution. Why do some media try to insinuate otherwise? Who owns and controls all these media?
u8080 14 hours ago [-]
>still external companies that will hand over data from europeans
The idea here is that EU three letter agencies also have access to your data
aucisson_masque 14 hours ago [-]
I’d rather have my data accessed by eu agencies than USA ones. Seeing how this country is turning more and more into a fascist oligarchy.
u8080 3 minutes ago [-]
If you let your govt abuse your rights, you will end in the same spot.
umanwizard 14 hours ago [-]
Right-wing populist parties are very popular in Europe, including in France and Germany, the two most important EU countries. There is a significant possibility that people with Trump-like ideologies will come to power there before too long.
SahAssar 14 minutes ago [-]
Right, but trump is in power in the US now.
potatototoo99 13 hours ago [-]
Trump is so incompetent he has killed any chance for far right politicians to be elected for the next decades. And even them hate him now due to Greenland.
umanwizard 12 hours ago [-]
I really don't think the first part of that is true. All significant recent polls in Germany have AfD at around 25% of vote intentions, which would probably give them the biggest fraction in the Bundestag, or second behind the CDU/CSU (but very close).
lxgr 13 hours ago [-]
> Who owns and controls all these media?
Never attribute to a cabal what can be adequately described by Gell-Mann-Amnesia.
amelius 14 hours ago [-]
Birdy has this Twittery sound to it.
thisislife2 17 hours ago [-]
Exciting news! Can't wait for iMessage to open up too. Any idea if this (or other future messengers) will work outside of Europe too or does WhatsApp use some kind of geofencing, like Apple, to prevent non-EU citizens from enjoying the same rights too?
thevillagechief 17 hours ago [-]
iMessage will not be opening up. They lobbied hard in the EU and got an exemption for not being popular enough there I guess.
nozzlegear 17 hours ago [-]
Did they lobby for an exemption, or is that just how the law is written?
bsimpson 17 hours ago [-]
The DMA is enforced by bureaucracy. The commission proposes that certain platforms are big enough to be regulated, and then there's a comment period/negotiation. The list of platforms currently being regulated is publicly available.
bootsmann 17 hours ago [-]
There is a hard number of users you have to achieve, its one of the reasons why iOS had to allow third party app stores but playstation did not.
arter45 17 hours ago [-]
In fact, Apple is still part of the DMA list with Safari, iOS, iPad OS and App Store.
drcongo 16 hours ago [-]
I might be misremembering, but I think iMessage implementing RCS was the compromise.
hocuspocus 14 hours ago [-]
Unlikely, iOS still doesn't support RCS in most European countries.
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
iMessage isn't popular enough in Europe to be broken up by the DMA from what I recall.
Hamuko 17 hours ago [-]
iMessage really isn't popular in Europe. Although the fact that any SMS sent between two iPhones automatically converts into an iMessage message means that there are definitely (accidental) users.
TZubiri 17 hours ago [-]
But iMessage is already open? You can send an SMS to any number and it shows in iMessage, completely interoperable through that standard protocol.
Whatsapp on the other hand does not show SMS messages (Which is a design choice that makes sense from a security perspective I guess, not saying it's wrong.)
kelnos 17 hours ago [-]
You're confusing two different things, though I don't blame you for it, as it is confusing. "iMessage" is the OTT E2E-encrypted chat protocol. "Messages" note the lack of the leading "i" and trailing "s") is an iOS app that lets you send and receive messages using both the iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS protocols.
iMessage is not open, and Apple fights efforts by other companies (e.g. Beeper) to interoperate with it.
TZubiri 12 hours ago [-]
Ok then, Apple's Messages is interoperable, as you can communicate via SMS with its users.
cheema33 14 hours ago [-]
> But iMessage is already open?
How do you send/receive messages from a Windows system? My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only.
TZubiri 12 hours ago [-]
>How do you send/receive messages from a Windows system?
You can send an SMS.
>My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only
No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol, that you can only use on Apple devices. But from non Apple devices you can use the standard SMS.
cheema33 3 hours ago [-]
>> My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only
> No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol...
Earlier you asked: "But iMessage is already open?"
Now you are saying that iMessage uses "Apple's proprietary protocol". I hope now you understand that when people say that Apple iMessage is not open, they are not talking about the SMS protocol that Apple does not own.
nottorp 15 hours ago [-]
> You can send an SMS to any number
Can you send a photo?
blell 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, through MMS or RCS.
hocuspocus 14 hours ago [-]
So, no. MMS is increasingly being discontinued in several regions, and RCS support is extremely patchy worldwide, especially on iOS.
nottorp 5 hours ago [-]
Let's rephrase: can you send a photo hassle free?
My_Name 13 hours ago [-]
Let me know when I can link it to the hundred whatsapp groups other people have added me to, so I can remove the stain of zuckerberg from as much of my life as possible.
velocity3230 4 hours ago [-]
Install a Matrix client and run a WhatsApp bridge and you can.
Is it trivial? No.
Is it possible? Yes, I do it.
B1FIDO 17 hours ago [-]
I must protest that this kind of announcement belies the stupidity of proprietary chat protocols.
Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols.
When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.
But of course, AIM purported to use Oscar at the time, but they really hated F/OSS and 3rd-party clients, and so did the other proprietary guys, so it became cat-and-mouse to keep the client compatible while the servers always tried to break their functionality.
Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.
I am not impressed. I am McKayla Maroney unimpressed.
I want open protocols and I want client devs who are free to produce clients in freeform, as long as they can follow the protocol specs. Now we have email clients who speak SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, including the "secured, encrypted" versions of those protocols. We should ask for nothing less when it comes to other communications.
otterley 17 hours ago [-]
We had XMPP, and even Google Chat used that in the early days.
It's not like users haven't had choice over the decades to choose software that runs on open standards. It's that the features and UX provided by closed software has been more compelling to them. Open standards and interoperability generally aren't features most people value when it comes to chat. They care mostly about what their friends and family are using.
Nextgrid 17 hours ago [-]
The issue isn't closed vs open but business models. The reason most services don't support third-party clients is that their business model is based on advertising (aka wasting the user's time) and a third-party client would reduce said wasted time.
A proprietary/for-profit messenger can very well use open protocols and embrace third-party clients if their business model wasn't explicitly based on anti-productivity.
kelnos 16 hours ago [-]
Right. Unfortunately, people have overwhelmingly voted with their wallets, and prefer to pay with their time and attention (and ignore the fact that they're being psychologically manipulated into buying random products and services) than with actual cash.
I expect you could get some people to pay for a messaging platform, but it would be a very small platform, and your business would not grow very much. And most of your users will still have to use other (proprietary, closed) messaging services as well, to talk to their friends and family who don't want to pay for your platform. While that wouldn't be a failure, I wouldn't really call that a significant win, either.
This is why legislation/regulation is the only way to make this happen. The so-called "free market" (a thing that doesn't really exist) can never succeed at this, to the detriment of us all.
otterley 17 hours ago [-]
The problem is that there's not much of a market for an ecosystem of commercial chat clients that use open standards underneath. It's not like it hasn't been tried. What ultimately ends up happening is the market becomes a race to the bottom, chat clients become a commodity product, and innovation ceases. It's essentially what happened with Web browsers and why we don't have a particularly robust for-profit market in that space.
petre 16 hours ago [-]
Google Chat used XMPP to build an user base and then cut it off from the Jabber network. That's when I stopped using it. Or was it when it got integrated into Gmail? Then they rebranded it and binned each iteration several times.
palata 15 hours ago [-]
Similar to Slack and IRC? I guess that's just part of the enshittification process.
buildfocus 17 hours ago [-]
> Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.
Resd the article - this isn't a proprietary secret API, it's the official intended interop API the EU now obliges them to provide. Not exactly 100% what you're asking for (I too would prefer common standards) but forcing interop access is a very good start.
arter45 17 hours ago [-]
Social networks and chat apps are mostly dominated by the network effect.
Since the purpose of these apps is literally putting you in contact with other people, you tend to use the same app/social network most of your friends and family are using.
This is not necessarily true for platforms you use to find new people, but even then, you're going to use the websites/apps people with your interests are using.
pipo234 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think his rant is against social networks or instant messaging perse, but about vendor lock in.
The way I read it is along the lines of
Mike Masnick's protocols not platforms.
I understand, but in this specific arena, because of the network effect, interoperability is important so you can hope to make a competitive product.
More in general,standard protocols are important but they don't necessarily avoid lock-in.
For example, imagine a Dropbox equivalent with a public API specification.
At some point you want to leave.
You are ready to use Postman or even curl and download everything to upload it somewhere else... but download is capped at 10 files/day per user. And you uploaded 100,000 files over years.
The API is public but good luck leaving with all your files!
In other words, standard protocols help avoiding client lock-in, but when the value is on the server side (data,...), they are not enough.
PEe9bB7D 17 hours ago [-]
Matrix is getting traction though...
Nextgrid 17 hours ago [-]
Matrix is a lost cause. The protocol is too complex/ambitious and the company behind it doesn't have the resources to actually produce a good server nor client implementation. I was hopeful for it at first but at some point you have to be realistic.
zenmac 17 hours ago [-]
While I agree with you, and there should more diverse members than just the people from Element.
What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking on their clients which makes migration a pain in the butt, but that is what one would expect from a true e2ee chat app.
And now they have two stable servers in rust. The French and German government including military are using the protocol to make their own apps. Maybe it should be something the EU should put some more resource into it?
palata 15 hours ago [-]
> What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking
Last time I checked, the Matrix servers had access to a lot of metadata. Did they fundamentally change it?
velocity3230 5 hours ago [-]
Encrypted metadata is in the works.
hermanzegerman 16 hours ago [-]
German Healthcare will also be using Matrix
vpShane 16 hours ago [-]
It was the invite floods of what was probably CP and cat torture that made me uninstall it and never look back.
No thanks on that. I don't have time or energy for these things.
kelnos 16 hours ago [-]
Is it? My experience with it has been middling at best, and I communicate with exactly zero people through Matrix outside of the context of open source projects.
The UX is still pretty bad, with many rough edges around sign-in and device verification. The message/encryption story has gotten better (it's been a long time since I've gotten spurious errors about being unable to decrypt messages), but it's still not particularly easy to use. Performance-wise I've found it to still be fairly bad; loading messages after I've been offline takes a noticeable amount of pause, something I rarely see with other messaging platforms.
On the plus side, Matrix does have many chat features that many people like (or even require) in a chat platform, like formatting, emojis, message reactions, threads, etc.
holri 17 hours ago [-]
WhatsApp uses the open Signal Protocol.
sedatk 16 hours ago [-]
That's a bit misleading. WhatsApp uses Signal's end-to-end encryption scheme, but not Signal's networking protocol. It's still proprietary. Otherwise, we could have cross-messaging between Signal and Whatsapp.
holri 7 hours ago [-]
WhatsApp just implemented cross messaging using the open Signal Protocol forced by the EU. We will see if the Signal messenger enables interop with WhatsApp, they are not forced to do this.
pipo234 16 hours ago [-]
Pedantic: I think you meant to say open whisper protocol, the end to end protocol which is Whatsapp copied from Signal.
palata 15 hours ago [-]
The name of the protocol is "Signal".
kelnos 16 hours ago [-]
> I must protest that this kind of announcement belies the stupidity of proprietary chat protocols. [...] In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.
ICQ was also a proprietary chat protocol. The Pidgin (then "Gaim") developers had to reverse-engineer it. Fortunately the folks at ICQ were less hostile toward third-party clients than AOL was toward Gaim's reverse-engineer of AIM's protocol, as you note. (Not to mention sending legal threats to the Gaim/Pidgin team to get them to change the name of the app.)
IRC was indeed king, when the internet was populated mostly by technically-savvy folks who could deal with its rough edges. (For example, you probably forget how annoying it was to get file transfer working over IRC; sometimes it was just impossible to do, depending on clients and NAT conditions and so forth. Things like ChanServ and NickServ were creative, but inelegant, hacks, functions that the protocol should handle directly.) And consider that IRC has more or less not changed at all in decades. I am a technically-savvy user, and I gave up on IRC, switching to Matrix for those types of chats, which has its own rough edges, but at least has modern features to sorta kinda make up for it. (Otherwise I generally use Signal, or, if I can't get people to switch, Whatsapp.) I want to be able to do simple formatting, react to messages, edit messages, etc. And most people in the world seem to want those things too. IRC has stagnated and doesn't meet most people's needs.
But I absolutely agree in that I want open protocols too. It's just hard to fight against big corporations with endless development, design, and marketing budgets. And those big corporations are not incentivized to build or support open protocols; in fact they are incentivized to do the opposite. As much as the EU does get some things wrong, I think we need strong governments to force companies to open up their protocols and systems for interoperability, and to stamp down hard on them when they comply maliciously, as Apple and Meta does. The EU is pretty much the only entity that comes close to doing that. I really wish the US was more forward-thinking, but our government is full of oligarchs and oligarch-wannabes these days, thanks to the lack of any meaningful campaign finance limits. At least California (where I live) has some GDPR-inspired privacy legislation, but I think something like the EU's DMA is still too "out there" for us here, unfortunately.
B1FIDO 16 hours ago [-]
ICQ was not only proprietary, but it was centralized and server-based, even though the messaging part was peer-to-peer.
Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet. Many of us were also on dialup lines that were intermittently connected, so they needed to establish some sort of persistent presence.
So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!
Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.
But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.
I believe it was them watching us over here all along. It must have been a personal-data goldmine to know when teens and young adults were online and who they were connected to, on the social graph, whether it was IM'ing or blogging the old-fashioned way on Livejournal.
So beware with your modern "disruptive" apps, particularly ones like those fun e-Scooters you can share and rent. They are probably psy-ops from foreign-based actors who enjoy watching and recording our movements.
amelius 14 hours ago [-]
When can I send messages from a PC running Python?
velocity3230 4 hours ago [-]
In a roundabout way, you can.
Today, I could write a Python script to connect to my Matrix Synapse server and send a message to rooms bridged to WhatsApp via the `mautrix-whatsapp` bridge.
That is not official, unmaintained since November 2024, and only applicable for the business API. It wouldn't allow someone to create a WhatsApp client for a non-Android/iOS platform.
charcircuit 13 hours ago [-]
>It wouldn't allow someone to create a WhatsApp client for a non-Android/iOS platform.
This is moving the goal posts.
amelius 13 hours ago [-]
The goal post was moved already because I said "when can I send messages" and not "when can my business send messages". Anyway, thanks for the link.
amelius 13 hours ago [-]
Looks like it is an API for the WhatsApp Business Platform.
You can just that a working script is run by crooks (and is not public)
dmitrygr 13 hours ago [-]
Hopefully - never ever ever ever ever.
I do not want spam.
This is why iMessage is much better than SMS - there is an implicit cost to send. This is why there is 100x (my experience) iMessage spam than SMS spam. Easy to send messages -> spam
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
> better than SMS - there is an implicit cost to send
Funnily enough, people being charged per SMS but being allowed to send as much messages as they need on apps like WhatsApp is exactly why SMS/MMS is barely used on a large scale outside of North America.
I rarely receive any spam on my phone. WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal do have the occasional obvious bot, but all apps make it trivial to block and get rid of any of them.
circuit10 11 hours ago [-]
It’s already possible to make WhatsApp bots, if the API was official they could moderate it better if anything so I don’t see how it would help with spam
direwolf20 10 hours ago [-]
All phone and internet services in the EU are connected to your personal identity document, similar to China. If you send spam, the police come to your house.
brabel 17 hours ago [-]
Don't they have a desktop app? The WhatsApp desktop app is heavy and annoying. Would love to use something else.
oblio 16 hours ago [-]
Just use the web version.
tcfhgj 12 hours ago [-]
The desktop version is the web version now
oblio 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand this.
tcfhgj 5 hours ago [-]
The desktop version is electron now (or soon)
t00 17 hours ago [-]
Closed, iOS only, invite only. Thanks.
Hackbraten 16 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the heads up. You saved me some frustration and disappointment.
neves 10 hours ago [-]
How to use it in Brazil? I don't trust Zuck.
B1FIDO 10 hours ago [-]
You now wish to use an app that freely interoperates now with Meta's WhatsApp, because you don't trust the guy who owns WhatsApp?
Trippy, dude!
thwg 16 hours ago [-]
When a smaller network tries to be interoperable with a larger network, the larger network almost always eats up the smaller one. This is how XMPP was killed by Gtalk, if any of you are old enough to remember.
oblio 16 hours ago [-]
Gtalk did not kill XMPP. Very few people were using XMPP before Gtalk, most people were using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and other proprietary protocols. Gtalk supported XMPP to gain traction as a more open messenger and possibly because they implemented the original version on top of XMPP to get it out the door faster.
Gtalk did pull the plug on XMPP but that didn't really change much.
I don't remember EVER interacting with someone with their own XMPP server. Gtalk had nothing to kill.
B1FIDO 16 hours ago [-]
Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd. I recall several colleagues who established Jabber addresses and advertised them, sometimes as their only IM address.
XMPP was more than Gtalk, but I think that Gtalk was the "death knell" for XMPP, having absorbed it and sort of claimed it as their own. Anyone who would've used federated Jabber addresses in those days is using Mastodon now.
oblio 5 hours ago [-]
> Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd.
Yeah, just like today, all 4 of them.
Gtalk put XMPP briefly in the spotlight, but for the masses, XMPP never really lived. It was a niche protocol with very niche usage. Just like Mastodon today.
Semaphor 5 hours ago [-]
Looks like it’s sadly mobile-only
16 hours ago [-]
odo1242 17 hours ago [-]
How does this work with end to end encryption? Just out of curiosity
Sorry to be "that guy", because I don't know the details of how WhatsApp does E2EE, but in any proper (as in secure and private) implementation the only thing that should matter is whether the client follows the spec? You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?
palata 15 hours ago [-]
The only thing that matter is whether you trust the app or not.
- If it is proprietary, you just have to blindly trust it (as is the case with WhatsApp currently: they say it is end-to-end encrypted, but you can't verify).
- If it is open source, then some people will want to understand how it works before they trust it. Other will either blindly trust (like for proprietary software) or trust that persons they trust understood how it works and were convinced.
> You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?
Well, exactly. I am interested in how the WhatsApp interop works just as I am interested in how HTTPS works.
odo1242 14 hours ago [-]
Well, yes. But one could think of a world in which WhatsApp has its own internal protocol and to bolt on third-party support they just decide to represent third party clients as “virtual clients” on the server side, which would be the easiest way to make it work while not having E2EE support. Especially since the feature only exists for legal compliance purposes.
(This is not the case, apparently.)
skippyboxedhero 17 hours ago [-]
I think the suspicion is based on this app being offered in a region whose government is hostile to privacy and this implementation being connected with the strong nativist bent in Europe.
The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider must be in Europe...okay.
jeroenhd 11 hours ago [-]
> Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU
The integration is only possible because the EU forced Meta's hand. The law only applies to massive digital empires with gatekeeper levels of control.
I don't think the EU would mind at all if Meta would permit American companies to interoperate with them. Meta won't just permit it, they have to protect their WhatsApp Business money machine of course.
That's also why the feature is only available to EU numbers. Not because BirdyChat hates Australians, but because WhatsApp won't permit them to send messages to numbers from those countries.
oblio 16 hours ago [-]
> region whose government is hostile to privacy
Which government?
skippyboxedhero 15 hours ago [-]
EU. I don't think it is any better at the national level however.
oblio 5 hours ago [-]
The EU is not a government. It's a loose economic confederation. And national European governments vary wildly in their positions on this.
snowmobile 52 minutes ago [-]
Call it what you want but the fact remains that they can write a lot of laws the member countries must follow, for better or worse. GDPR, Chat Control, etc.
Trufa 17 hours ago [-]
That's not what OP is asking, he's asking how do you have two separate e2e encrypted apps that can interact.
snowmobile 48 minutes ago [-]
By following the same protocol... This has been done for ages. PGP and GPG for example.
odo1242 14 hours ago [-]
Yep. And apparently the answer is they both use the Signal Protocol.
TZubiri 17 hours ago [-]
I can confirm that you don't know.
I can count 3 mistakes here:
1- The client isn't the only thing that matters (There's servers)
2- The client doesn't follow a spec in WhatsApp, there is no spec as it's a private non-interoperable system.
3- Browsers and HTTPS work with an entirely different encryption model, TLS is asymmetric, certificate based and domain based. TLS may be used in Whatsapp to some extent, but it's not the main encryption tool.
snowmobile 49 minutes ago [-]
I think you're intentionally being obtuse. If an app does E2EE well, then the servers should have no control over the encryption. Otherwise it's not end-to-end, by definition. Regarding the "private non-interoperable system", the whole point of TFA is that EU made them open it up. See https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess... Your last "point" is irrelevant because I never claimed anything about the similarity between encryption models. Have you ever heard of a "simile"?
ExpertAdvisor01 16 hours ago [-]
Hope the new Whatsapp interface won't be abused for spam .
As Whatsapp already has spam issues .
Will it run through meta's anti-spam filtering ?
16 hours ago [-]
altern8 17 hours ago [-]
This is pretty amazing, but I wish they picked a better name for it. I have a feeling that a good amount of people will dismiss it just because of the name.
kelnos 17 hours ago [-]
What's wrong with the name? "WhatsApp" sounds pretty dumb to me, too, but it's entrenched in the social consciousness, so we don't really think about it.
(The name even has nothing to do with chat; originally WhatsApp was a way to share your "current status"; "WhatsApp" sounds like "what's up?".)
LexiMax 16 hours ago [-]
Complaining about names seems like a surefire way to induce endless bikeshedding conversations that go nowhere. It's also often cited as a too-convenient excuse for why a service fails that doesn't really account for the market realities or whatever systemic failures were at play.
The truth is that 15 years ago, "tweet" was seen as a joke by those who weren't extremely online. It didn't stop Twitter from becoming a desirable place to socialize, at least for a time. If the internet made "tweet" happen, people can get used to any weird nomenclature.
trinix912 14 hours ago [-]
The problem I have with names like BirdyChat is they're not easy to remember and even less easy to explain to someone whose first language isn't English. Like yeah, we know it's "Chat" and "Bird" combined and all but to a lot of people it's just "Bdytsch something". Compare that to Twitter which is relatively easy to pronounce and remember.
Forgejo is even worse in that regard. I live in Europe, speak 5 languages, and still have to think to remember the proper pronunciation every time.
It's much harder to get people on board with yet another messenger app when they forget the name 5 minutes later.
GoatInGrey 15 hours ago [-]
Birdy evokes the same energy as "BabySeal". I imagine you can understand why an app called "BabySealChat" would be off-putting to a thirty-something disgruntled developer?
altern8 17 hours ago [-]
I don't think Whatsapp sounds dumb. It's "what's up", and it came out when mobile apps were getting popular with everyone. I immediately got it when I heard it the first time, and it sounded good to me.
"BirdyChat" just sounds childish.
Maybe I'm in the minority, who knows, but project names are important. I've seen so many posts of people dismissing projects just because of the name...
pbhjpbhj 16 hours ago [-]
Gimp would have to be the extreme example of this. I used to recommend Krita to people, despite it being less appropriate for photo editing, just to avoid using 'Gimp' in work/polite scenarios.
I agree - "Birdy" is the name used with infants when talking about birds, or is a bird toy that photographers use to distract people ... which is a bit too close to the truth, perhaps.
To me it also suggests 'a toy version of Twitter'; and Twitter already had enough negativity around it for me.
LexiMax 16 hours ago [-]
Somehow I feel like GIMP's lack of popularity has more to do with its reputation for having a horrendous and impenetrable interface than its name.
At one point in the recent past there was a fork of GIMP named "Glimpse," yet weren't a sudden influx of users who were waiting for a more polite name.
altern8 15 hours ago [-]
I would say both.
BUT, lack of users might just be that it's too late, now. People use web-based tools like Figma, I wouldn't think a lot of people are looking for a Photoshop alternative.
snowmobile 17 hours ago [-]
What's wrong with the name? Some cultural reference I'm not getting?
altern8 17 hours ago [-]
It just sounds—let's say—too playful.
Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea.
That might just be me, not sure.
snowmobile 45 minutes ago [-]
Because a pun on "What's Up?" and "App" is so professional? Maybe I'm old but I remember a time when I though WhatsApp was an extremely silly name for a SMS replacement.
iknowstuff 15 hours ago [-]
What would they think about a “Slack” at work
altern8 14 hours ago [-]
They would probably cut them some slack and buy it anyways.
I couldn't work out what the hell the app is from the website, as the home page tells you it's a "New Home for Work Chat" and mentions "Still using personal chat apps for work conversations?" - so I'm guessing it's supposed to have some business focus, but the app name makes it sound like something you'd install for your kids. I can't imagine ever saying to someone "we need to discuss contract details, let's talk on BirdyChat".
It looks like it's focused on business but its name sounds childish. If I mentioned that in a corporate meeting people would just laugh at me, I don't think it helps their case.
Onavo 17 hours ago [-]
Twitter. Also it could mean penis (in some places).
TZubiri 17 hours ago [-]
It can always be rebranded later on
bni 15 hours ago [-]
Does this mandate allow me to use a. 3rd party Teams, Google Chat and Slack client?
I suspect the answer is no, but why?
usr1106 15 hours ago [-]
There are criteria for how dominant a platform is to be considered gatekeeper. Teams, Google and Slack have much smaller market share for private messaging, so I guess they are not affected. Don't remember the criteria by heart.
benoau 15 hours ago [-]
They are not designated gatekeepers. It is unfortunate because interoperability should be its own objective for its own sake.
aniviacat 15 hours ago [-]
Because they're not big enough to be considered a "gatekeeper".
vpShane 16 hours ago [-]
This means nothing good, Meta and its products are a privacy nightmare, with WhatsApp having major market share outside of the U.S.
People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available.
No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.
Nextgrid 16 hours ago [-]
Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format? I think now they have some bullshit proprietary paid cloud storage solution (why not let me use the cloud I already pay for?), but for years they haven't had any solution for iOS at all.
Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up having to use & fix some Github project that simulated Signal's transfer protocol to simulate a target device to export my data.
I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.
B-Con 16 hours ago [-]
Any time an app has bizarre functionality gap on iOS, I assume it's because of Apple's anti-consumer bullshit app restrictions.
No idea if that's actually what's going on, but Apple thinks of their devices as appliances and hates when apps offer pro-customer features.
pseudalopex 15 hours ago [-]
No. The Signal developers opted out of iOS's backup and export features.
fph 3 hours ago [-]
I have no idea why, but I would bet it's because it was sending stuff to Apple unencrypted.
jolmg 11 hours ago [-]
> Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format?
> I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.
That doesn't fix anything, does it?
Last time I tried to export a years-long WhatsApp chat, I was only able to export a few-weeks-worth, IIRC. WhatsApp chat exports also don't include media. It's just a txt file. The backup is limited to using Google and it's done in such a way that you're not allowed to download it yourself.
The only way to export the chat was to use the web client and scroll all the way to the top, then copy-paste the HTML out of web-inspector once everything loaded. I don't think that's possible anymore. IIRC, the web client now tops at some point with a message like "use the Android app to look further back".
Nextgrid 11 hours ago [-]
> That doesn't fix anything, does it?
But moving to Signal doesn't either. You're moving from one walled garden to another. If you're going to burn the resources and "political points" encouraging people to move it's better be worth it - right now for the casual user Signal is worse than WhatsApp or even Telegram.
digiown 8 hours ago [-]
Signal doesn't allow you to do that on any platform. The only way I know of to get the data out is via some random github project to extract operate on the encrypted backup from android: https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools
ivm 15 hours ago [-]
Signal's UX is years behind even modern WhatsApp, let alone Telegram, which is closer to a blogging or social platform. We can't expect mass adoption of such a clunky app simply because it's more private – it has never worked that way.
UserMark 5 hours ago [-]
I've been beta testing https://www.joinmorse.com lately it's in very early stages, but it's promising (if you don't care about the "social" features).
palata 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm old, but there is nothing I use in WhatsApp that does not exist in Signal. What are you missing there?
ivm 14 hours ago [-]
Various group features like communities and group voice chats, public channels, voice message transcription, only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own, backup is still marked as beta in 2026, no business features while all business here use WhatsApp in one way or another…
jeroenhd 11 hours ago [-]
I don't use any of the other features (in fact, I actively avoid them and would disable them if they ever came to Signal), but:
> only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own
Also, local backups haven't been beta for ages. The free cloud backups are the ones that are new.
ivm 11 hours ago [-]
But we're talking about mass adoption, not Hacker News users' preferences. Signal simply doesn't offer anything attractive to most people.
As someone who spends a dozen hours on WhatsApp and Telegram each week, I don't see any real benefits either.
jeroenhd 11 hours ago [-]
Signal offers a chat app that works fine and is not owned by Meta. That's enough for a significant amount of people to switch already. I'd love some quality of life updates to some of the niche features, like the desktop app, but the mobile app does everything it needs to do.
Community chats aren't what keep people on WhatsApp, the network effect does.
wtetzner 3 hours ago [-]
For most people quality of life stuff will probably rank higher than "not owned by Meta". I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of WhatsApp users don't even know (or care) it's owned by Meta.
ivm 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and to overcome the network effect, you need something compelling enough to justify the effort in the first place. I have hundreds of local contacts on WhatsApp, many of whom have joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits (for example, a local firefighter feed is shared through a channel there). But I only have about 20 contacts on Signal, even IT guys aren’t there. It simply doesn’t offer anything appealing to at least 95% of the people around me.
maqp 1 hours ago [-]
>joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits
Sorry, social media masquerading as a secure messaging app isn't a secure messaging app.
ivm 44 minutes ago [-]
I bet nobody joins Telegram because of its perceived security, it's a content platform.
nottorp 15 hours ago [-]
Doesn't this signal thing require a phone number?
p1anecrazy 16 hours ago [-]
Just use Telegram, at least it’s not U.S. made
maqp 15 hours ago [-]
* Not end-to-end encrypted by default.
* No end-to-end encryption for groups.
* No end-to-end encryption for desktop meaning normal use when working on computer requires you and your friends to constantly whip out phone to send 1:1 secret chats. Nobody wants to do that so they revert to non-E2EE chats.
* Terrible track record with end-to-end encryption deployment from AES-IGE to IND-CCA vulnerabilities
* Open source, but it's meaningless as it only confirms the client doesn't protect content or metadata from the server.
palata 15 hours ago [-]
I think Signal is a better alternative, even though it's US made. It's open source.
fragmede 16 hours ago [-]
and people using it. That may not matter much to you, but that's usually what people what from their chat app.
globular-toast 5 hours ago [-]
Why would I use this closed source program instead of another closed source program. I don't trust some random company from Latvia any more than I trust Meta. We need this interop to be available for free software clients. I want something like Pidgin.
aryehof 3 hours ago [-]
Only for “verified professionals”… “work email” please.
This isn't a general chat app alternative.
1a527dd5 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder if this will force Apple to open up iMessage.
zer0zzz 17 hours ago [-]
Last I heard iMessage was not deemed an eu “gatekeeper” so no
serial_dev 17 hours ago [-]
I don’t know anyone in Europe who uses iMessage, everyone is on WhatsApp though.
uriegas 17 hours ago [-]
I believe iMessage is only used in the USA. In Latin America almost everyone uses WhatsApp.
DeathArrow 5 hours ago [-]
Still, no one will adopt BirdyChat because of this.
aryehof 3 hours ago [-]
Only for “verified professionals”… “work email” please.
Find this exclusionary and distasteful.
yigalirani 15 hours ago [-]
Would that work outside europe?
mytailorisrich 17 hours ago [-]
This is app/company from Latvia, as I understand.
sahiljagtapyc 13 hours ago [-]
damnn
17 hours ago [-]
booleandilemma 6 hours ago [-]
I've recently been feeling like consumers overseas get better treatment from tech companies than us here in the US. Unskippable ads are illegal in Vietnam, and now Europeans get interoperable messaging in WhatsApp. Meanwhile here in the US we're getting shafted. When are we going to put our collective feet down and say enough is enough?
phishingpharao 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
m00dy 17 hours ago [-]
I can vibecode this in an hour.
hsbauauvhabzb 13 hours ago [-]
You could have vibecoded a better comment too. But you didn’t.
jakkos 16 hours ago [-]
My new favorite breed of commenters are AI bros who go around lamenting how trivial other peoples' work is, while they themselves fail to create anything that anyone else actually wants to use
nottorp 15 hours ago [-]
Based on other comments it is bad enough to be vibe coded :)
morphle 16 hours ago [-]
Warning! Badly broken user interface, I wouldn't trust these programmers to get the end-to-end encryption right.
On the second screen of the app there is already an infuriating bug: they ask to give your work email because than you go hire in priority on their invite-only waiting list. So you type in your email again and again and again, alternating between all your emails, but you keep returning to the form asking for your work email. You check those emails to see if they send you something to activate your account but nothing. Exasperated you try the only other button, sign up with private email instead. Guess that works, because you leave the infinite loop. But than zilch, nada, nothing.
Don't these script-kiddies use their own app?
AgharaShyam 16 hours ago [-]
This is really amazing. I hope some regulation like DMA comes to India as well.
Does WhatsApp charge money for this? If not, why would a business use their API? They could simply create an app to directly talk to their customers, or am I missing something?
Rendered at 12:40:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.
The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.
The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.
Here in EU you pay for that. Soon as you send an image, you get charged extra. Completely useless compared to Whatsapp
There are phone deals that include unlimited SMS messages, but not MMS.
Have you considered that the EU isn't one country?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service
It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically download and appear immediately, due to bandwidth and resource constraints.
I guess a phone/app could exist that does convert to MMS instead, though, since the app can make that decision.
All the B2C services I work with are sending SMS to my phone. Not RCS, not iMessage: they are sending SMS messages.
All the MFA providers, such as Twilio and Okta, are sending SMS.
All the political campaign spammers are sending SMS.
All the reminders for appointments and bills are sending SMS.
All the notifications for apps where Push isn't good enough: they're sending SMS.
If user-to-user communication is using iMessage then that is fine. I have noticed that only about 2 of my human contacts use RCS, and at least 2 of them are using iPhones and not Androids for it. So that's some anecdata for ya!
That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over discord.
Given its popularity among gamers of all nationalities, I wonder where discord stacks up in relation to the EU's DMA?
Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.
It's not a technical problem. It's a political one
The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).
How do you do encryption?
I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
If you want people to switch, recommend Telegram.
Why would people switch from always-end-to-end encrypted group chats to never-end-to-end encrypted group chats?
Boosting Russia is not the solution.
I use Signal to communicate with other tech folks, but good luck convincing your dentist/doctor/etc to send reminders on signal instead of WhatsApp.
There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
WhatsApp strikes a good balance of usability and security. Telegram is too insecure (no E2E by default). Signal is too secure (no chat exports).
Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp, even without the network effects.
Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.
Signal is the closest but they fall short because they prioritize privacy over features. Which is their choice to make, but it means they have ruled themselves out from going mainstream. If you're not targeting feature parity with WhatsApp then you have zero chance of supplanting it.
Telegram prioritises idk the FSB spying on your chats, that app gives me the creeps.
it's the network effect.
If normies who don't care for things (which is most people tbh) don't decide to switch, do you, as a techie/early adopter, just turn off whatsapp and disconnect with your normie friends? You are unlikely to be important enough in the friend group to force a switch, not to mention that this needs to happen enmass for a swing in the network effect to happen.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Imagine all your friends love pizza, as do you. Suddenly you decide sushi is better so, naturally, you tell your friends to try out sushi at the next dinner. Assuming some of your friends are not absolutely against sushi, yes, you’ll have that sushi dinner. But what if they don’t like it that much? They will revert to pizza or accept sushi, occasionally, when they want to see you, while still prefering pizza for all other interactions.
There has to be a perceived advantage for changing habits. If few people see the benefits of Signal or other non-Whatsapp apps, they will not change their minds.
and only those who actually succeed being unreasonable is remembered. The other unreasonable people simply get forgotten or ignored - the vast majority.
I'm the only person I know who ever did it.
I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).
Signal has end-to-end encryption working on all devices. Telegram doesn't because they're amateurs.
Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.
You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.
>I guess you are from Ukraine?
Nope.
>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly
The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.
When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.
Maybe it was tongue in cheek and I missed it.
Most people communicate with the ones in their region. Even when going on vacation most people can afford only to travel around their own continent.
Ukraine isn't in the EU, neither is Swicerland, Norway or, most famously, the UK. All of these are on the European continent, all of these have citizens living right near a border with an EU country and regularly having to communicate with the EU side.
To you maybe. Not everyone has overseas contacts.
It's not really the "overseas" usecase that is the sticking point for many businesses.
Does your business in Spain ever need to message Brits who are there on holiday? Does your business in Greece ever have customers who drive across the border from Albania?
… useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.
It's difficult when it comes to messengers, but reasonably easy when it comes to Google and Android, for which good alternatives exist (e.g., DuckDuck on GrapheneOS.)
This is preposterous. You'd see ads for Gemini, not ChatGPT.
And so do the courts. Give them some time to cook. How goes the popular American saying: We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.
How long? I'm still waiting for the GDPR to actually be enforced meaningfully.
> It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe
Yeah, like every single cookie banner out there not actually being compliant. A regulation can't be considered to be meaningfully enforced when every single storefront openly breaches it in total impunity for years.
It's several years old by now but nothing has changed. It is still more profitable to breach the GDPR than to comply with it.
Lina Khan didn't move fast enough, then she was shown the door.
Maybe the EU will persist where the US FTC/DOJ could not?
Wait, you mean passing feel-good legislation has knock-on effects? Who would have thought?
Without Trump making a huge fuss everytime US companies have to do something that can hurt their monopolies, we'd probably already be there
Spam prevention is a likely angle, however. EU should force it to be opt-out, not opt-in -- probably what people want anyway.
FAIL
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant (that app is European and thus must care about GDPR). They do not have my permission to have/handle my private data, and GDPR does not allow WhatAspp to hand it over without my permission either... My name (which whatsapp exposes simply with my phone number) is considered PII under GDPR and
And speaking about the other end: I have bad news about all the data you share with untrustworthy contacts on WhatsApp…
Quite practically, anyone that enables backups (which WhatsApp heavily nudges people to do) uploads a copy of all your messages and media sent to them to a cloud provider you have no privacy agreement with.
As for your second comment, updated first comment with:
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant if that app is European. They do not have my permission to have my private data, and GDPR does not allow whatAspp to hand it over without my permission either...
Did you call that drug dealer every Tuesday evening? Looks suspicious. Did that criminal call you the day before he robbed a store not far from your home? Looks suspicious. Do you call Pakistan twice a week? Looks suspicious. Have you ever called a suicide prevention hotline? A bank other than your own? A mosque? An independent political party?
Your POTS phone was always revealing information.
Only to who you choose to make it available to. And if you choose “everybody”, I don’t see how you can reasonably expect this to mean “everybody not using third-party software”?
You should get to control how/ to whom your data is distributed, but also requiring these recipients to only use software and services of your choosing seems excessive. Platform lock-in at this point seems like the much greater harm.
I could see the case for a small indicator in the contact details that they’re using a third-party client, but anything more (green bubbles?) would be counterproductive.
You did have to initiate the call, but you still didn’t have any kind of agreement about it.
If you are bored and have a computer, you can add every possible phone number as a contact. Not many people do that, but some did.
Chatting with anyone has always been opt in from the point of the receiver, so I don't get your point?
And how many of these are there? Anyone?
> Messages, attachments and other materials that you send through BirdyChat to your contacts;
No thanks
* https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy...
* Webapp: https://trianguloy.github.io/OpenInWhatsapp_Web/
I'm just grateful for this app, so I thought that maybe other HNers might find it useful.
I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice, and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don't exist yet AFAIK, and they're truly game-changers. Will that change? Does the DMA mention anything other than chat? Perhaps someone could enlighten me.
The downside, of course, is that voice and video will not work.
Oh, and perhaps a ton of initial invitations, one for every conversation you have open.
There are open servers you can join, with the bridges enabled, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose. At that point you might as well use a commercial, closed-source offering, as, ironically, a corporation with a large footprint you can sue. Average Joe with an AWS instance you might not be able to track down, should your data leak.
https://github.com/element-hq/synapse
https://github.com/mautrix/meta
Edit: Saw your other comment now.
"Built for better conversations Reach people with their email, not their phone number. Designed for focused, meaningful exchanges between managers, builders, and collaborators."
Is it using email protocols to send messages or is it using email addresses as a proxy for usernames?
The claim of a drive for better conversations is not really that accurate because better conversations rely on a more universally used app/system than presently exists. Ie, a replacement that would have to grow internationally extraordinarily quickly.
Apple figured that out... iMessage was basically a cheat code to a vast userbase almost instantly. What Apple didn't figure, however, was that iMessage's green/blue thingy that went on for so long didn't really give android/sms users fomo, but really, it just created an unneeded communication barrier. Such barriers are the exact opposite of what is needed for a communication platform to be excellent. Unfortunately, decisions counter to what may be perceived as income generating are difficult to reverse.
These sorts of apps may not be revolutionary enough I fear. I would love to adopt something like this, but Meta continue to make too many billions to let their monopoly on human communication management to be taken away that easily.
Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own. Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day.
Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion
I think the pitch here is exactly the opposite of that? Many businesses in the EU already use WhatsApp for customer contact - this lets you separate your business communications from the app you use for personal messaging
You might be interested in our state of the bird posts... https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird
From a cursory glance of their CSAE policy, combined with the above, it seems they would be very eager to comply with the dreaded "chat control".
https://www.birdy.chat/privacy
WhatsApp does the same: have you noticed how the photos you receive have a debatable quality? Presumably (and hopefully) the sender's app downscaled them before e2e encryption.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...
But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
> If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well
This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.
The obvious implication of the above statement is that the US government should force the company to do this.
>This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have.
When Americans ask their government for the exact same thing that Europeans asked their government for, suddenly Europeans think Americans are "entitled". There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".
At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.
>It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so.
It was once believed that privacy is a right that all humans share, and should be advanced for everyone. Modern scholars understand that this view is mistaken. Privacy is a privilege (your word, not mine!) that Europeans earned through their refined culture and discernment. Us Americans will need to catch up in terms of ancient ruins, cheese, and multilingualism in order to earn the the same privilege that Europe has by birthright =)
>At let’s not forget, most of the egregious privacy violations like faang and adtech come from American companies.
Was this statement intended to disprove my claim that 'There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".'?
SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card).
Brussels rarely works for the little people; they just support whatever the big players at the moment want, unless they are foreign and can come up with a reason to tax them.
It is delusional to think politicians in Brussels care about the little guys; it is always about maintaining or gaining power, otherwise they wouldn't come up with absurd regulations that hit the small players much harder than any of the big ones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736050
Interoperability by agreement between legitimate messaging services, using custom APIs is the only realistic and secure way to accomplish this.
Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.
They're both b2b products that are gonna try to find their first users by pitching the idea that you can use their products to spam WhatsApp users.
Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. Here, let me save you a click: https://haiket.com/press/release-nov11.html
> Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.
How does this imply he has any connection to Meta? Companies license patents all the time.
> Before Haiket, Alex founded a number of technology start-ups and helped develop innovative voice solutions for Facebook and Google.
At the very least, I think it's safe to say he has some connections within Meta that he utilised for this purpose. He's definitely not a complete outsider whose startup (with no actual product) just happened to be picked by Meta.
My bad. I searched for “Meta” instead of “Facebook.” Quite a few other red flags in that press release.
> Haiket is launching the Beta trial from today, with a pipeline of future innovation for early adopters, including a pioneering silencing technology that will allow users to speak privately in public, with voice communication that only your device can hear.
Does anyone else think this sounds beyond ridiculous?
This is fairly straightforward - you have the device spew out noise with similar characteristics to human speech (ie. random overlapping syllables in the speaker's voice). Take a recording then subtract the random syllables.
Only your device can do the subtraction, because only your device knows the waveform it transmitted.
Obviously in a room with lots of reverb this will be a bit harder, since you will also need to subtract the reflection of what was transmitted with a room profile and deal with the phone moving in the room, but it sounds far from impossible.
Surely this only works if you're using the phone as a speakerphone (and are therefore almost certainly being an arsehole in public[0])?
[0] Because if it was an actual speakerphone situation, hiding your voice would be stupid.
By the time this back-and-forth reaches its end, these two will find some shady b2b customers and are gonna be touted as "successful European startups".
- the default choice needs to be "strictly necessary cookies
- with other less prominent buttons for "allow all" and "deny all"
- a site is not allowed to force you to have the press a bunch of buttons or select a bunch of things to deny most/all cookies
The problem lies in enforcement. Unless you are a huge player, there is almost nil chance you're gonna get fined.
I think about the only thing missing is that they should have RFC'd a standard akin to Do Not Track, except this would have communicated to sites if your default is "strictly necessary", "allow all" or"deny all". With it being set to "strictly necessary" by default.
I am curious: why is that difficult? Define the fine as a percentage of the revenue of the company, have users report links, and pay someone to check the link and send the fine.
Sounds like easy money... I mean it's very profitable to pay people to check parking lots and fine drivers who don't follow the regulations. This should be even more profitable?
But admitting you are subject to the laws of a country/entity is one thing, sending them your books (when your company is not based there) is kind of on a different level
The gears are turning slowly, but they're doing really useful work.
The DMA will change nothing in this regard because the "many apps" approach is the most beneficial to users.
Why? I'd love to be an alternative whatsapp client with all kinds of new features that the official client doesn't have. Obviously you say you're building a compatible chat network, but the reality is users are just using your client to talk to whatsapp users.
Eg. one feature I'd love is some AI to automatically take any date and time someone mentions to me and put it as a draft event in my calendar. I miss so many events from big group chats I'm not paying proper attention to and suddenly everyone is saying "Whoa, you didn't come to Johns 50th birthday?!? Why not? We invited you months ago[in a group chat with 100 messages a day of mostly memes]"
Would love to know how it is "obviously" against my interest to make a chat app and have 3.3 billion users adressable instantly. Bad for internet health to be still tied to Meta, sure, but the damage was done and this is a way to reverse it.
You won't get enough people to pay you money to use your app to make it profitable. If you think you will, then you have a business already; go build it!
Which revenue? Whatsapp is for free, those 3.3 billion people use it for free, the revenue is the reselling of user data and showing them ads. Which they would do less with a 3rd party client, and as such Meta fights it tooth and nail.
> You won't get enough people to pay you money to use your app
It might surprise you but people build apps just for fun, free and open source for others to use, just to make the world better. Which really would be in this case, that's also the intention of this law.
> For interoperability to work, both you and your WhatsApp contacts need to be based in the EEA.
Does my contact phone number need to have an EEA country code? Does my current IP address need to be geolocated in the EEA? Do I need to download the two apps from a regional App Store in the EEA? Do I need to show an EEA payment method to both apps? What happens to my chats if I move or switch app stores?
I dare to claim: A majority of EU citizens know really nothing about Latvia.
I also don't think there's such a thing as "made in Europe", as if it was "made in USA". Is it made in Germany, Italy, Albania..?
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/running-business/devel...
Most notably, Airbus is an "European company".
I think it would be similar to saying "First American chat app that...", which would be ambiguous?
Their service operates in the European Economic Area, which includes more countries than the EU and is therefore closer to the European geographic surface.
I'm in Poland and can drive 2 hours and stop understanding what people are saying to me (in German and Czech).
That was my point.
I've always found this a weird take. European (EU) countries are more similar to each other than any country outside of Europe is to any European country.
In your example, if you drive two hours to Germany or Czechia, your car will still be insured, all your bank cards will still work, the price of your mobile phone service stays the same, you'll have a good idea how health and employment systems work, and the chances are you'll be able to talk to people in English.
It remains true that the barriers the businesses face are higher, but that's not what your example was about.
You think finland and malta are more similar to each other than sweden and norway?
They can fabricate the product in Bursa and do final assembly in West-Istanbul.
The way I see it, "made in Europe" may be dubious, but "made in EU" should be just as okay to write as "made in USA". And if it's not a thing, well, nothing is a thing until people make it a thing.
EDIT: also we're talking about a software product here, where most things written on the product is legally meaningless - otherwise we'd have special customs regimes for those major software exporter places like "love" and "♡".
"Made in EU" would be equivalent to "Made in USA", and I'm pretty sure it's regulated.
This is just an app though, so they can say whatever they want. I've seen "Made with love", "Made on Earth", etc.
"For Europe, this is our chance to build competitive alternatives to Big Tech. But we need European-hosted infrastructure to make that possibility a reality."
Page is hosted in USA.
I wondered whether it can be used with Whatsapp groups: Apprently not yet.
I have long requested this feature for Whatsapp Business, where I can pay an annual subscription just to have more than one number. So I can separate life between Business and Friends.
WhatsApp is not a great name either, but catchy and somewhat simple.
BirdyPo.. I mean BirdyChat sounds like when doves cry. But not as catchy.
Also, I am all in favour of Europeans becoming less dependent on the USA (yet-another-ICE-killing incident today, with video footage contradicting the claims made by the current government - again), but there is kind of ... a weak decision-making process here. Lobbyists sell to Europeans that Amazon data servers in Europe, now comply with european laws. Well, those are still external companies that will hand over data from europeans, so that is not a solution. Why do some media try to insinuate otherwise? Who owns and controls all these media?
The idea here is that EU three letter agencies also have access to your data
Never attribute to a cabal what can be adequately described by Gell-Mann-Amnesia.
Whatsapp on the other hand does not show SMS messages (Which is a design choice that makes sense from a security perspective I guess, not saying it's wrong.)
iMessage is not open, and Apple fights efforts by other companies (e.g. Beeper) to interoperate with it.
How do you send/receive messages from a Windows system? My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only.
You can send an SMS.
>My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only
No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol, that you can only use on Apple devices. But from non Apple devices you can use the standard SMS.
> No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol...
Earlier you asked: "But iMessage is already open?"
Now you are saying that iMessage uses "Apple's proprietary protocol". I hope now you understand that when people say that Apple iMessage is not open, they are not talking about the SMS protocol that Apple does not own.
Can you send a photo?
Is it trivial? No.
Is it possible? Yes, I do it.
Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols.
When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.
But of course, AIM purported to use Oscar at the time, but they really hated F/OSS and 3rd-party clients, and so did the other proprietary guys, so it became cat-and-mouse to keep the client compatible while the servers always tried to break their functionality.
Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.
I am not impressed. I am McKayla Maroney unimpressed.
I want open protocols and I want client devs who are free to produce clients in freeform, as long as they can follow the protocol specs. Now we have email clients who speak SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, including the "secured, encrypted" versions of those protocols. We should ask for nothing less when it comes to other communications.
It's not like users haven't had choice over the decades to choose software that runs on open standards. It's that the features and UX provided by closed software has been more compelling to them. Open standards and interoperability generally aren't features most people value when it comes to chat. They care mostly about what their friends and family are using.
A proprietary/for-profit messenger can very well use open protocols and embrace third-party clients if their business model wasn't explicitly based on anti-productivity.
I expect you could get some people to pay for a messaging platform, but it would be a very small platform, and your business would not grow very much. And most of your users will still have to use other (proprietary, closed) messaging services as well, to talk to their friends and family who don't want to pay for your platform. While that wouldn't be a failure, I wouldn't really call that a significant win, either.
This is why legislation/regulation is the only way to make this happen. The so-called "free market" (a thing that doesn't really exist) can never succeed at this, to the detriment of us all.
Resd the article - this isn't a proprietary secret API, it's the official intended interop API the EU now obliges them to provide. Not exactly 100% what you're asking for (I too would prefer common standards) but forcing interop access is a very good start.
Since the purpose of these apps is literally putting you in contact with other people, you tend to use the same app/social network most of your friends and family are using.
This is not necessarily true for platforms you use to find new people, but even then, you're going to use the websites/apps people with your interests are using.
The way I read it is along the lines of Mike Masnick's protocols not platforms.
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
More in general,standard protocols are important but they don't necessarily avoid lock-in.
For example, imagine a Dropbox equivalent with a public API specification.
At some point you want to leave. You are ready to use Postman or even curl and download everything to upload it somewhere else... but download is capped at 10 files/day per user. And you uploaded 100,000 files over years.
The API is public but good luck leaving with all your files!
In other words, standard protocols help avoiding client lock-in, but when the value is on the server side (data,...), they are not enough.
What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking on their clients which makes migration a pain in the butt, but that is what one would expect from a true e2ee chat app.
And now they have two stable servers in rust. The French and German government including military are using the protocol to make their own apps. Maybe it should be something the EU should put some more resource into it?
Last time I checked, the Matrix servers had access to a lot of metadata. Did they fundamentally change it?
No thanks on that. I don't have time or energy for these things.
The UX is still pretty bad, with many rough edges around sign-in and device verification. The message/encryption story has gotten better (it's been a long time since I've gotten spurious errors about being unable to decrypt messages), but it's still not particularly easy to use. Performance-wise I've found it to still be fairly bad; loading messages after I've been offline takes a noticeable amount of pause, something I rarely see with other messaging platforms.
On the plus side, Matrix does have many chat features that many people like (or even require) in a chat platform, like formatting, emojis, message reactions, threads, etc.
ICQ was also a proprietary chat protocol. The Pidgin (then "Gaim") developers had to reverse-engineer it. Fortunately the folks at ICQ were less hostile toward third-party clients than AOL was toward Gaim's reverse-engineer of AIM's protocol, as you note. (Not to mention sending legal threats to the Gaim/Pidgin team to get them to change the name of the app.)
IRC was indeed king, when the internet was populated mostly by technically-savvy folks who could deal with its rough edges. (For example, you probably forget how annoying it was to get file transfer working over IRC; sometimes it was just impossible to do, depending on clients and NAT conditions and so forth. Things like ChanServ and NickServ were creative, but inelegant, hacks, functions that the protocol should handle directly.) And consider that IRC has more or less not changed at all in decades. I am a technically-savvy user, and I gave up on IRC, switching to Matrix for those types of chats, which has its own rough edges, but at least has modern features to sorta kinda make up for it. (Otherwise I generally use Signal, or, if I can't get people to switch, Whatsapp.) I want to be able to do simple formatting, react to messages, edit messages, etc. And most people in the world seem to want those things too. IRC has stagnated and doesn't meet most people's needs.
But I absolutely agree in that I want open protocols too. It's just hard to fight against big corporations with endless development, design, and marketing budgets. And those big corporations are not incentivized to build or support open protocols; in fact they are incentivized to do the opposite. As much as the EU does get some things wrong, I think we need strong governments to force companies to open up their protocols and systems for interoperability, and to stamp down hard on them when they comply maliciously, as Apple and Meta does. The EU is pretty much the only entity that comes close to doing that. I really wish the US was more forward-thinking, but our government is full of oligarchs and oligarch-wannabes these days, thanks to the lack of any meaningful campaign finance limits. At least California (where I live) has some GDPR-inspired privacy legislation, but I think something like the EU's DMA is still too "out there" for us here, unfortunately.
Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet. Many of us were also on dialup lines that were intermittently connected, so they needed to establish some sort of persistent presence.
So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!
Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.
But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.
I believe it was them watching us over here all along. It must have been a personal-data goldmine to know when teens and young adults were online and who they were connected to, on the social graph, whether it was IM'ing or blogging the old-fashioned way on Livejournal.
So beware with your modern "disruptive" apps, particularly ones like those fun e-Scooters you can share and rent. They are probably psy-ops from foreign-based actors who enjoy watching and recording our movements.
Today, I could write a Python script to connect to my Matrix Synapse server and send a message to rooms bridged to WhatsApp via the `mautrix-whatsapp` bridge.
https://pypi.org/project/whatsapp-python/
This is moving the goal posts.
(So not free, not for consumers)
https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messa...
I do not want spam.
This is why iMessage is much better than SMS - there is an implicit cost to send. This is why there is 100x (my experience) iMessage spam than SMS spam. Easy to send messages -> spam
Funnily enough, people being charged per SMS but being allowed to send as much messages as they need on apps like WhatsApp is exactly why SMS/MMS is barely used on a large scale outside of North America.
I rarely receive any spam on my phone. WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal do have the occasional obvious bot, but all apps make it trivial to block and get rid of any of them.
Trippy, dude!
Gtalk did pull the plug on XMPP but that didn't really change much.
I don't remember EVER interacting with someone with their own XMPP server. Gtalk had nothing to kill.
XMPP was more than Gtalk, but I think that Gtalk was the "death knell" for XMPP, having absorbed it and sort of claimed it as their own. Anyone who would've used federated Jabber addresses in those days is using Mastodon now.
Yeah, just like today, all 4 of them.
Gtalk put XMPP briefly in the spotlight, but for the masses, XMPP never really lived. It was a niche protocol with very niche usage. Just like Mastodon today.
- If it is proprietary, you just have to blindly trust it (as is the case with WhatsApp currently: they say it is end-to-end encrypted, but you can't verify).
- If it is open source, then some people will want to understand how it works before they trust it. Other will either blindly trust (like for proprietary software) or trust that persons they trust understood how it works and were convinced.
> You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?
Well, exactly. I am interested in how the WhatsApp interop works just as I am interested in how HTTPS works.
(This is not the case, apparently.)
The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider must be in Europe...okay.
The integration is only possible because the EU forced Meta's hand. The law only applies to massive digital empires with gatekeeper levels of control.
I don't think the EU would mind at all if Meta would permit American companies to interoperate with them. Meta won't just permit it, they have to protect their WhatsApp Business money machine of course.
That's also why the feature is only available to EU numbers. Not because BirdyChat hates Australians, but because WhatsApp won't permit them to send messages to numbers from those countries.
Which government?
I can count 3 mistakes here:
1- The client isn't the only thing that matters (There's servers)
2- The client doesn't follow a spec in WhatsApp, there is no spec as it's a private non-interoperable system.
3- Browsers and HTTPS work with an entirely different encryption model, TLS is asymmetric, certificate based and domain based. TLS may be used in Whatsapp to some extent, but it's not the main encryption tool.
(The name even has nothing to do with chat; originally WhatsApp was a way to share your "current status"; "WhatsApp" sounds like "what's up?".)
The truth is that 15 years ago, "tweet" was seen as a joke by those who weren't extremely online. It didn't stop Twitter from becoming a desirable place to socialize, at least for a time. If the internet made "tweet" happen, people can get used to any weird nomenclature.
Forgejo is even worse in that regard. I live in Europe, speak 5 languages, and still have to think to remember the proper pronunciation every time.
It's much harder to get people on board with yet another messenger app when they forget the name 5 minutes later.
"BirdyChat" just sounds childish.
Maybe I'm in the minority, who knows, but project names are important. I've seen so many posts of people dismissing projects just because of the name...
I agree - "Birdy" is the name used with infants when talking about birds, or is a bird toy that photographers use to distract people ... which is a bit too close to the truth, perhaps.
To me it also suggests 'a toy version of Twitter'; and Twitter already had enough negativity around it for me.
At one point in the recent past there was a fork of GIMP named "Glimpse," yet weren't a sudden influx of users who were waiting for a more polite name.
BUT, lack of users might just be that it's too late, now. People use web-based tools like Figma, I wouldn't think a lot of people are looking for a Photoshop alternative.
Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea.
That might just be me, not sure.
It looks like it's focused on business but its name sounds childish. If I mentioned that in a corporate meeting people would just laugh at me, I don't think it helps their case.
I suspect the answer is no, but why?
People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available.
No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.
Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up having to use & fix some Github project that simulated Signal's transfer protocol to simulate a target device to export my data.
I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.
No idea if that's actually what's going on, but Apple thinks of their devices as appliances and hates when apps offer pro-customer features.
> I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.
That doesn't fix anything, does it?
Last time I tried to export a years-long WhatsApp chat, I was only able to export a few-weeks-worth, IIRC. WhatsApp chat exports also don't include media. It's just a txt file. The backup is limited to using Google and it's done in such a way that you're not allowed to download it yourself.
The only way to export the chat was to use the web client and scroll all the way to the top, then copy-paste the HTML out of web-inspector once everything loaded. I don't think that's possible anymore. IIRC, the web client now tops at some point with a message like "use the Android app to look further back".
But moving to Signal doesn't either. You're moving from one walled garden to another. If you're going to burn the resources and "political points" encouraging people to move it's better be worth it - right now for the casual user Signal is worse than WhatsApp or even Telegram.
> only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031836512-St...
> backup is still marked as beta
Also, local backups haven't been beta for ages. The free cloud backups are the ones that are new.
As someone who spends a dozen hours on WhatsApp and Telegram each week, I don't see any real benefits either.
Community chats aren't what keep people on WhatsApp, the network effect does.
Sorry, social media masquerading as a secure messaging app isn't a secure messaging app.
* No end-to-end encryption for groups.
* No end-to-end encryption for desktop meaning normal use when working on computer requires you and your friends to constantly whip out phone to send 1:1 secret chats. Nobody wants to do that so they revert to non-E2EE chats.
* Terrible track record with end-to-end encryption deployment from AES-IGE to IND-CCA vulnerabilities
* CEO pretends to be exiled from Russia but in secretly visits Russia over SIXTY times in 10 years https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/
* Zero metadata protection from server
* Open source, but it's meaningless as it only confirms the client doesn't protect content or metadata from the server.
This isn't a general chat app alternative.
Find this exclusionary and distasteful.
On the second screen of the app there is already an infuriating bug: they ask to give your work email because than you go hire in priority on their invite-only waiting list. So you type in your email again and again and again, alternating between all your emails, but you keep returning to the form asking for your work email. You check those emails to see if they send you something to activate your account but nothing. Exasperated you try the only other button, sign up with private email instead. Guess that works, because you leave the infinite loop. But than zilch, nada, nothing.
Don't these script-kiddies use their own app?
Does WhatsApp charge money for this? If not, why would a business use their API? They could simply create an app to directly talk to their customers, or am I missing something?