WhatsApp will become interoperable with other messaging apps in Europe
tuta.com100 points by marvinborner 2 days ago
100 points by marvinborner 2 days ago
WhatsApp is the only chat app I've encountered that refuses to work* if you don't give it access to your contacts. The last thing I want is to give it access to even more chats. Go eat a bag of dicks, Meta. More like "metastatic"
* you can respond to messages but are very limited in what you can initiate (as such they got you as part of someone else's contact list)
I think this might only be true on Android? Apple has a strict policy that the basic app functionality must work even without permissions. And testing right now, I can send messages to direct numbers without having given access to my contacts.
Original poster explained that the functionality is having a contact list. WhatsApp will either access and use ALL your contacts or none on iPhone as well as android. Having jumped through many hoops to preserve conversations without leaking contacts, I’m highly attuned to this…
Recent iOS versions allow you to share only a small subset of contacts, which is really useful for apps like these
nope. he literally wrote "cannot initiate messages if you don't give it access to your contacts" and that's false on iphone. on iphone whatsapp has its own separate contact list if you don't give it access. and it is like this for years.
Not true in India. WhatsApp initially worked without access to the Contact list, and you could send a message to someone by typing their number directly in WhatsApp. But after a few updates, it does not allow you to start any new conversation without access to the contact list. And if you still ignore it, further updates prevent you from using WhatsApp at all unless you give it access to the contact list.
I doubt whatsapp is customized per country and no idea what's going on there. For me it was like this probably 4-5 years ago. Right now whatsapp on iphone allows me to create a new contact and then message that contact. The contact is only saved in whatsapp. App has no access to my contacts.
> Apple has a strict policy that the basic app functionality must work even without permissions.
Is this true? How does Apple enforce this? I ask because WhatsApp initially worked fine on an iPhone, without any access to the contact list, but after a few upgrades, it demanded access to the Contacts list to send messages to new numbers, and did not allow you to do so by typing a phone number directly.
> WhatsApp is the only chat app I've encountered that refuses to work if you don't give it access to your contacts*
I've never given it access to my contacts. (iOS.) It's worked fine. I recently started giving it access to a limited set of my contacts, but that was for convenience.
This is why you should use Graphene's contact scopes and only allow access to contacts that you want to contact on WhatsApp.
I don't have this issue at all, I just selectively only give it access to some contacts.
It seems to no longer even scan the contacts by itself, only when you hit "New Chat", press the triple dots and then "Refresh".
Still a pretty garbage app but at least in terms of this it seems to have actually improved.
Telegram did this for me when I tested it years ago. Instantly uninstalled.
Perhaps you'd be interested in learning that you can initiate chats to phone numbers (regardless of contact status) by going to wa.me/<phone-number>
I've never tested it without contacts permissions though.
You can send the phone number to yourself in chat and then click it to open it for chat.
If I stopped and looked at how many redundant apps I have right now that’d be wild. For messaging alone, I’m on iMessage, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, IRC, many in-app DM secondary tier feature chats, and perhaps a few other esoteric ones. Can we go back to just IRC please, those were the days for me.
I miss the days when I could start Pidgin and it'd automatically log into every single service I use, and I could chat with anybody regardless of which service they were on. I didn't need half a dozen different apps running just to chat. It felt like a utopia compared to what we have today.
We're working hard on getting back to that, but it takes time, and we're an unfunded open source project, but soon maybe?
You may be interested in our monthly updates https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird
This is why we must have open interoperable standards, like the Internet used to and was meant to be.
People tried to standardize on XMPP back in the day, but capitalism figured out that standardize didn't fit their profit motivation. These days XMPP is a bit of an dated XML-heavy protocol, but Matrix is a newer alternative, and it supports bridging.
No profit in allowing people to communicate freely without intermediaries.
How to middle man and gatekeep otherwise?
While I agree with you, there's certainly other ways to make money in an open protocol. Email perhaps is a good example, we are still on SMTP/IMAP and there's lots of business built on custom clients and whatnot. (Ok, maybe not the best example haha but hopefully you get my point here)
Email is a glorious relic from the truly distributed internet that could have been...
That is why its so useful! It was just designed to work not enslave or en-silo.
The opportunities came after the market was created and adoption was wide-spread because it was just so useful.
The security business opportunities exploded once Microsoft got into the market and things like computer viruses spread via email due to their total negligence and enabling ;)
I can still remember nasty things like Lotus notes or ccmail but once email became widespread and the momentum was undeniable they could not give that sh*t away -- they did try that too.
There are definitely ways to make money.
The problem is that you cannot make as much money as you would by gatekeeping, which means billions of dollars of VC money goes to the gatekeeping app that offers its experience for free and no ads, and spends hundreds of million on ads, influencers, and partnerships to promote their offering and kill the open competition.
And once they’re entrenched enough that’s when they turn the screws on the customer.
Unfortunately our antitrust laws didn’t imagine a world where the marginal cost of serving a new customer was close to 0, so offering a product for free in order to kill competition doesn’t really trigger antitrust laws even though it’s the same kind of behavior.
I think the closest we came to something like this was Slack suing MSFT for bundling Teams, and that probably only stood a chance because of Microsoft’s history.
I also have many messaging apps, but they are all different personas of myself, intended for different audiences. I have zero interest in mixing them.
That could still be part of the protocol though, that's the beauty of protocols versus SaaS. Everyone wins, not just the gatekeepers.
In the 90s and early 2000s, my MSN (personal chats with people I knew IRL), Yahoo Chat (chats with people I met in Yahoo Games), ICQ (strangers all over the world) all were different personas and server different purposes.
And yet using those different chat services would have been unimaginable if it wasn’t for Trillian and then later Adium when I moved to a Mac.
Combining them into a single app with a singular UI, the same KB shortcuts, and being able to easily control notifications etc was a game changer.
This feels like a distraction from what is really needed: a return to open standards/protocols.
I love the idea of Matrix but the complexity of key management and federation for the average person is far too high. Signal is a perfect direct replacement for WhatsApp but it still requires a phone number.
RCS is good enough... as a fallback protocol. I don't want a dependency on a phone number or a single physical device.
Why is email so durable but federated messaging so fragile? If we can make PGP/GPG email more accessible I wonder if that could translate to instant messaging?
> If we can make PGP/GPG email more accessible I wonder if that could translate to instant messaging?
You might be amazed...
Another messaging app to try and convince my friend to try with me! Perfect haha, thanks.
The only possible way to return to open standards and protocols would be to make a closed protocol illegal.
That was vaguely the state of things before the DMCA here in the US. Sega had no legal ability to stop other companies from selling cartridges that played on a genesis for example, and in one court case the Judge ruled that the company was legally right to breach Sega's trademark rights to achieve that interoperability. Sony, Nintendo, and others all lost similar suits about trying to restrict interoperability with their products and software.
In fact, Sega was going to lose that case so badly, and the precedent was so clearly beneficial to the consumer and market, that they chose to settle it to prevent the precedent from being established. That this is something you can choose to do well after it becomes obvious how the case should end is an atrocious feature of the US "justice" system. You shouldn't get to take a case all the way to a verdict, and then have an appeals court poke holes in your claims and then say "actually we don't want any of this on the record anymore"
The DMCA as written makes it very easy to prevent interoperability by law simply with a bit of code here or there to make token efforts to prevent access.
I like this, a long time ago there were quite a few multi-service messaging clients that tied into AIM, MSN, Yahoo etc it was very convenient.
The downside is only the "gatekeepers" have to provide this interoperability, when it would be far more useful if all the popular platforms were facilitating it.
Yeah this only cements WhatsApp's monopoly because everyone has to implement WhatsApp's proprietary protocol.
Still it's a bit less worse than the current situation where you're forced to use the upstream app because "security" or whatever.
Still I agree that pre-2012 IM status was much better when open protocols were more popular. Of course there was the Windows Live Messenger thing but even you could use something like Pidgin to chat with it.
iirc WhatsApp uses the same protocol as Signal.
It's a bit more complicated:
>In order to maximize user security, we would prefer third-party providers to use the Signal Protocol. Since this has to work for everyone however, we will allow third-party providers to use a compatible protocol if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.
>To send messages, the third-party providers have to construct message protobuf structures which are then encrypted using the Signal Protocol and then packaged into message stanzas in eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
>Meta servers push messages to connected clients over a persistent connection. Third-party servers are responsible for hosting any media files their client applications send to Meta clients (such as image or video files). After receiving a media message, Meta clients will subsequently download the encrypted media from the third-party messaging servers using a Meta proxy service.
You also have to connect over XMPP and through a proprietary "Enlistment API", etc.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...
But if there are multiple independent clients and a reverse-engineered protocol, then it should be possible for someone to develop a third-party server implementation.
You have to be approved by Meta and must sign an NDA: https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...
Matrix/Element wrote more on the issue than what is referenced in the article: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/09/whatsapp-dma/
I dislike fb a fair bit, but if whatsapp effectively replicated functionality of pidgin, I would seriously consider it despite its otherwise evil behavior. If they made it open source with permissible license, I might even forgive some of fb's past transgressions. They do have the resources to pull it off.
And what about E2E encryption? How will that work for users? Or will WhatsApp go the iMessage way and signal that you're talking to a non user of the platform and that you should be careful what you say there?
For the iOS world, ideally the Messages app would be mandated to become a generic interface receptive to protocol plug-ins to interoperate with all messaging networks; and it too itself would be replaceable in that role.
I'm not sure Apple can be a good steward of such an open, plug-in based solution - they would always put in some restrictions to make the process very complicated and not accessible to platforms and developers.
At the same time, making it possible to choose WhatsApp for the default messaging app has been a great relief for those not locked into Messages.
Well the thing is: if they were particularly obnoxious about their implementation, they could be replaced. I’m looking forward to a multi-protocol messaging client that implements other protocols as plugins. If and when such a thing arrives, I’m setting it to be my default.
A complication is that iMessage supports a ton of collaboration features that don't (and largely can't) exist across other messaging apps. The messaging bits will have the same nerfed interface as SMS/RCS because of missing capabilities.
Despite having the appearance of a messaging app, iMessage operates as a backbone for a lot of OS capability that is surprisingly deep.
That seems like a good idea in the sense that it's better than separate apps for everything, but it's also probably the wrong level of abstraction. For example: what happens if you try to create a group chat containing an RCS user, a WhatsApp user, and a Telegram user? Ideally it would just work, but I don't see how that's possible without support for such a thing at a deeper level than just the UI layer.
> BirdyChat and Haiket are the first two messaging apps that will initially be interoperable with WhatsApp.
What the heck are BirdyChat and Haiket? Both of those don't seem to actually exist, they just have a waitlist on their homepage.
Literally the only post on BirdyChat's blog is how they're now WhatsApp-compatible, but their initial Google Play release happened 45 days ago (Oct 16th).
Haiket's website similarly contains only one press release, which is to say that they're accepting waitlists since Nov 11th, but they're somehow funded by the "former CEO of AT&T Communications and board member of Palo Alto Networks and Lockheed Martin".
Facebook will attempt malicious compliance. They will try every trick so that they follow the letter of the law, but still undermine the regulators goals. I think this is round 1: Facebook figured out a way that only two irrelevant apps are initially interoperable.
I was curious too, but I figured I was just an out of touch millennial who didn't know what all the kids were chatting on these days and didn't want to say anything...
What would be far more useful is easy export/import functionality not tied to iOS/Android backups. i lose some messages every time I switch phones; it's a mess
Android: You can get the message db with root. You can export individual chats in text version right from the interface. The message media is stored in the user folders.
Still bad, sure, but there are worse offenders.
I want to read this in original language, but this website always directs me to it's german version.
Really annoying! Respect my decision as a user to choose the language I want, not where my IP comes from...
It's been a pain point for me for years with many services.
Shameless plug on the topic: https://www.fer.xyz/2021/04/i18n
This is a really cool initative, but I'm a bit worried about spam.
I'm more worried this happens because meta wants to access other networks to train their algorithms for free - just like with fediverse integration on threads.
Of course, this is still only an unfounded guess but I can't believe they're doing this selflessly, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Being opt-in for the WhatsApp user reduces the severity of that problem a lot, though certainly not to zero for those who do opt in.
TBH it also reduces the usefulness of the features a lot. If I first have to contact people on another channel to tell them to enable this feature because I want to message them, well, I guess most people wont just do it.
What WhatsApp really needs to do is allow people to store their chats in the cloud. WhatsApp is the only communication tool that forces people to keep everything on their phones - or delete information. This causes WhatsApp to take up a large chunk of the available space on most phones.
Ctrl-F XMPP
Hmm.
Remember when gTalk had XMPP and Facebook killed XMPP by refusing to support it and launching the chat silo wars?
I generally wouldn’t want my messages going to WhatsApp/Meta/Facebook, but I’m not from a country where usage of those apps is very high at all.
I wonder how this will work with e2e encryption?
I'm sick of having so many different messaging apps. Everyone is using a different one, so you have to download another app, signup for something, figure out how to configure it & etc etc.
We need a modern Trillian or Pidgin that just connects to and talks to everything. To be fair, Pidgin still has lots of plugins for many different chat protocols. I don't know how well maintained they are and if they work consistently.
https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
Meta is only rolling this out in Europe. This does nothing to shake their alarming monopolies in places like India.
Well the Indian government can consider a law similar to the EU Digital Market Acts that enforces such behaviour.
I see no reason why none of all those extremely talented developers that America desperately needs can't come up with a messaging service of their own.
They can and they have. It's the lock-in Meta is imposing that's preventing new options to succeed in the market.
If you have said this about Apple/Google, I would have said ... maaaaaayyybeeeeee ...
But in this case, how exactly does Meta prevent people from India downloading and using another messaging app?
Nothing. It's a monopoly in a market that is heavily network dependent. Without interoperability, it's infeasible for a new option to become viable. Though I'm sure you know this already and just believe that monopolies are alright for consumers.
I guess it is more about captured user base than the technology.
What other differentiating factors can you implement that can steer the masses from one messaging platform to the other. I cannot think of any.
I wonder if that would allow Signal to become interoperable with Whatsapp?
FTA: As reported by Heise Online, Signal and Threema will not establish connections allowing for interoperability with WhatsApp.
I wouldn't want any cross-talk between my secure messaging app and anything that is owned by Meta.
Your comms are only as secure as the node receiving them.
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