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…
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
WhatsApp is the core of Indian society. It's used by the government, all businesses, and everyone with a smartphone. It's used for payments, customer service, scheduling doctor's appointments, etc. You literally cannot replace it with something else anymore.
* 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)
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