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.

>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.

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.

How so exactly? They can say they are keeping conversations secure from 3rd parties.

because its EU only ????? you want it to be enabled by default while only certain amount of people want to use it

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.

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'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.

https://github.com/element-hq/synapse

https://github.com/mautrix/meta

And Apple does this while also ignoring the rule about third–party app stores — they are not supported.

> 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".

And you don't have to use any of it, feel free to stop tomorrow.

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.

Let's not pretend you ever bothered to check if that's actually true

Nexus used to support unlimited profiles for the whole phone including every app, Samsung phones don't.

> 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.

I see a second round of legislation might be needed. They'll get it right eventually.

> 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.

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.

But WhatsApp is already completely open for spammers. They can use the secret API or screen-scrape WhatsApp itself.

AFAIK it's Signal with proprietary extensions, so it's effectively closed.

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.

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.

I won't understand why people do that when Hetzner is so effective.

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.

Looks like it is an API for the WhatsApp Business Platform.

(So not free, not for consumers)

https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messa...

> 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.

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.

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

Did they lobby for an exemption, or is that just how the law is written?

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.

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.

> 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.

> You can send an SMS to any number

Can you send a photo?

The desktop version is the web version now

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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".

Twitter. Also it could mean penis (in some places).

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".

Maybe I'm old, but there is nothing I use in WhatsApp that does not exist in Signal. What are you missing there?

* 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 don’t know anyone in Europe who uses iMessage, everyone is on WhatsApp though.

Based on other comments it is bad enough to be vibe coded :)