BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp
birdy.chat432 points by joooscha 9 hours ago
432 points by joooscha 9 hours ago
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
SMS isn't widespread in the US, iMessage is.
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.
>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.
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
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
Shouldnt be hard to convince folks. Everyone i know hates facebook / meta and is just waiting for an agreed upon alternative.
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.
Everybody says this until there’s an alternative.
There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.
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.
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"
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.
Signal has exports.
Which non hacker news user exports chats?
I'm the only person I know who ever did it.
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).
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.
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.
[flagged]
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.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> Give them some time to cook
How long? I'm still waiting for the GDPR to actually be enforced meaningfully.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is it not enforced "meaningfully"? (I don't know what is meaningful to you)
Here's a good overview: https://noyb.eu/en/data-protection-day-are-europeans-really-...
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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
Could you clarify - What has been implemented as opt-in by WhatsApp to act as a hurdle?
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.
Is this a per-contact setting or a "universal" one?
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
Account-wide. Though you can only turn it on in Europe.
When you say Europe you mean the EU? I'm not seeing an option in the UK. (Yay Brexit)
Each whatsapp user needs to enable the setting once to allow chats with multiple number of third party users.
Yep, 100% malicious compliance on Meta's part. I hope they get punished for this.
How so exactly? They can say they are keeping conversations secure from 3rd parties.
How the opt-in is considered acceptable, that's a toothless resolution
because its EU only ????? you want it to be enabled by default while only certain amount of people want to use it
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
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.
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...
> 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”?
Because I don't chose everybody? I don't want everyone to see my information, why would I?
Because until today that IS what it meant! Are you claiming that "pray i do not change the deal further" is a sane approach?
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.
It's not requiring, thats the point of BirdyChat, right? You just have to opt-in to use it.
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.
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.
Several people have scraped every possible phone number from WhatsApp so they know your name, picture, and status if they want it.
So, that doesn't mean we give it away freely because someone was malicious. That makes no sense.
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.
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.
Yes, and you used to have to pay for it! Not only was it opt-in, there was a charge.
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.
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".
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
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.
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.
I loved Pigdin! The UI and brand was so good, too, for Linux back in the day...
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.
How have you been running it? How did you make it interoperable?
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.
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
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.)
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.
> 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.
Pure projection on your part.
Let's not pretend they would do this if the tech monopolies were european.
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.
This five-month-old comment suggests that birdychat uses telegram, pivot maybe?
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.
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.
Nexus used to support unlimited profiles for the whole phone including every app, Samsung phones don't.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>> 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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I see a second round of legislation might be needed. They'll get it right eventually.
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".
They never got cookie popups right. What makes you so confident?
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.
> 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?
If I am business outside Europe, why would I send Europe what my revenue is?
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.
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.
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.
> 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]"
> 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.
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!
> 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.
How to use it in Brazil? I don't trust Zuck.
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!
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.
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?
>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
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.
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.
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.
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).
> Who owns and controls all these media?
Never attribute to a cabal what can be adequately described by Gell-Mann-Amnesia.
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.
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.
But WhatsApp is already completely open for spammers. They can use the secret API or screen-scrape WhatsApp itself.
Doesn't Whatsapp already use an open source protocol? https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
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. ;)
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.
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?
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..?
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?
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.
> 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.
Could even be Turkey west of the Bosphorus.
They can fabricate the product in Bursa and do final assembly in West-Istanbul.
Plenty of supermarket products say made in Europe, particularly (but not only) white label products.
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.
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 "♡".
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.
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.
The company of the website appears to be based in Riga, Latvia https://company.lursoft.lv/en/fyello-productivity/4020345542...
Reminds me eurosky.social they have on page:
"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.
When can I send messages from a PC running Python?
WhatsApp has an official API you can use already.
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.
>It wouldn't allow someone to create a WhatsApp client for a non-Android/iOS platform.
This is moving the goal posts.
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.
Looks like it is an API for the WhatsApp Business Platform.
(So not free, not for consumers)
https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messa...
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
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.
> 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.
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
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?
iMessage will not be opening up. They lobbied hard in the EU and got an exemption for not being popular enough there I guess.
Did they lobby for an exemption, or is that just how the law is written?
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.
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.
In fact, Apple is still part of the DMA list with Safari, iOS, iPad OS and App Store.
I might be misremembering, but I think iMessage implementing RCS was the compromise.
iMessage isn't popular enough in Europe to be broken up by the DMA from what I recall.
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.
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.)
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.
Ok then, Apple's Messages is interoperable, as you can communicate via SMS with its users.
> 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.
>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.
> You can send an SMS to any number
Can you send a photo?
Yes, through MMS or RCS.
So, no. MMS is increasingly being discontinued in several regions, and RCS support is extremely patchy worldwide, especially on iOS.
Don't they have a desktop app? The WhatsApp desktop app is heavy and annoying. Would love to use something else.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
How does this work with end to end encryption? Just out of curiosity
They explained it to some extent here: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...
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?
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
That's not what OP is asking, he's asking how do you have two separate e2e encrypted apps that can interact.
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.
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.
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?".)
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
What's wrong with the name? Some cultural reference I'm not getting?
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.
Personally I hate the name because it reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdy_Nam_Nam (whose work I like)
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".
Yes, exactly.
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.
Does this mandate allow me to use a. 3rd party Teams, Google Chat and Slack client?
I suspect the answer is no, but why?
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.
They are not designated gatekeepers. It is unfortunate because interoperability should be its own objective for its own sake.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
Maybe I'm old, but there is nothing I use in WhatsApp that does not exist in Signal. What are you missing there?
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just use Telegram, at least it’s not U.S. made
* 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
* 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.
I think Signal is a better alternative, even though it's US made. It's open source.
and people using it. That may not matter much to you, but that's usually what people what from their chat app.
Closed, iOS only, invite only. Thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similar to Slack and IRC? I guess that's just part of the enshittification process.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
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.
Matrix is getting traction though...
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
WhatsApp uses the open Signal Protocol.
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.
Pedantic: I think you meant to say open whisper protocol, the end to end protocol which is Whatsapp copied from Signal.
> 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.
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.
I wonder if this will force Apple to open up iMessage.
Last I heard iMessage was not deemed an eu “gatekeeper” so no
I don’t know anyone in Europe who uses iMessage, everyone is on WhatsApp though.
I believe iMessage is only used in the USA. In Latin America almost everyone uses WhatsApp.
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?
Would that work outside europe?
This is app/company from Latvia, as I understand.
damnn
[dead]
I can vibecode this in an hour.
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
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?