WhatsApp will become interoperable with other messaging apps in Europe
tuta.com

・

75 points

・

marvinborner

・

8 hours ago

66 comments

anonymars ・ 6 hours ago

WhatsApp is the only chat app I've encountered that refuses to work* if you don't give it access to your contacts. The last thing I want is to give it access to even more chats. Go eat a bag of dicks, Meta. More like "metastatic"

* you can respond to messages but are very limited in what you can initiate (as such they got you as part of someone else's contact list)

  • sethops1 ・ 6 hours ago

    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.

    • ckemere ・ 6 hours ago

      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…

      • nasretdinov ・ 2 hours ago

        Recent iOS versions allow you to share only a small subset of contacts, which is really useful for apps like these

      • throwaway290 ・ an hour ago

        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.

  • JumpCrisscross ・ 2 hours ago

    > 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.

  • ThePowerOfFuet ・ 9 minutes ago

    Telegram did this for me when I tested it years ago. Instantly uninstalled.

  • sparkie ・ 6 hours ago

    This is why you should use Graphene's contact scopes and only allow access to contacts that you want to contact on WhatsApp.

  • gear54rus ・ 6 hours ago

    Perhaps you'd be interested in learning that you can initiate chats to phone numbers (regardless of contact status) by going to wa.me/<phone-number>

    I've never tested it without contacts permissions though.

    • wodenokoto ・ 2 hours ago

      You can send the phone number to yourself in chat and then click it to open it for chat.

    • throw-the-towel ・ 3 hours ago

      They broke that just several weeks ago, at least for me.

hmokiguess ・ 6 hours ago

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.

  • Yokolos ・ 6 hours ago

    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.

  • baiwl ・ 2 hours ago

    I also have many messaging apps, but they are all different personas of myself, intended for different audiences. I have zero interest in mixing them.

    • hmokiguess ・ 11 minutes ago

      That could still be part of the protocol though, that's the beauty of protocols versus SaaS. Everyone wins, not just the gatekeepers.

  • jjav ・ 6 hours ago

    This is why we must have open interoperable standards, like the Internet used to and was meant to be.

  • theknarf ・ 6 hours ago

    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.

    • arthurfirst ・ 6 hours ago

      No profit in allowing people to communicate freely without intermediaries.

      How to middle man and gatekeep otherwise?

      • hmokiguess ・ 4 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        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)

        • arthurfirst ・ 3 hours ago

          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.

benoau ・ 8 hours ago

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.

  • sunaookami ・ 7 hours ago

    Yeah this only cements WhatsApp's monopoly because everyone has to implement WhatsApp's proprietary protocol.

    • Gualdrapo ・ 7 hours ago

      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.

    • whizzter ・ 6 hours ago

      iirc WhatsApp uses the same protocol as Signal.

    • ForHackernews ・ 7 hours ago

      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.

progval ・ 7 hours ago

Matrix/Element wrote more on the issue than what is referenced in the article: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/09/whatsapp-dma/

  • pogue ・ 7 hours ago

    That's from 2024. Has there been any recent updates?

    • progval ・ 5 hours ago

      None, as far as I know. But it doesn't seem like Meta's stance changed either.

zenoprax ・ 6 hours ago

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?

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 ・ 7 hours ago

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.

qubex ・ 7 hours ago

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.

  • isodev ・ 7 hours ago

    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.

    • qubex ・ 7 hours ago

      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.

  • jandrewrogers ・ 7 hours ago

    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.

  • Ajedi32 ・ 6 hours ago

    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.

brettermeier ・ 7 hours ago

I want to read this in original language, but this website always directs me to it's german version.

Really annoying! Respect my decision as a user to choose the language I want, not where my IP comes from...

prmph ・ 7 hours ago

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

  • poisonborz ・ 7 hours ago

    Android: You can get the message db with root. You can export individual chats in text version right from the interface. The message media is stored in the user folders.

    Still bad, sure, but there are worse offenders.

timpera ・ 8 hours ago

This is a really cool initative, but I'm a bit worried about spam.

  • jkaplowitz ・ 7 hours ago

    Being opt-in for the WhatsApp user reduces the severity of that problem a lot, though certainly not to zero for those who do opt in.

    • ale42 ・ 6 hours ago

      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.

ExoticPearTree ・ 6 hours ago

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?

daft_pink ・ 5 hours ago

I generally wouldn’t want my messages going to WhatsApp/Meta/Facebook, but I’m not from a country where usage of those apps is very high at all.

lupire ・ 7 hours ago

Ctrl-F XMPP

Hmm.

Remember when gTalk had XMPP and Facebook killed XMPP by refusing to support it and launching the chat silo wars?

sva_ ・ 7 hours ago

I wonder how this will work with e2e encryption?

input_sh ・ 7 hours ago

> 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".

  • pogue ・ 7 hours ago

    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...

pogue ・ 7 hours ago

I'm sick of having so many different messaging apps. Everyone is using a different one, so you have to download another app, signup for something, figure out how to configure it & etc etc.

We need a modern Trillian or Pidgin that just connects to and talks to everything. To be fair, Pidgin still has lots of plugins for many different chat protocols. I don't know how well maintained they are and if they work consistently.

https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...

smt88 ・ 8 hours ago

Meta is only rolling this out in Europe. This does nothing to shake their alarming monopolies in places like India.

  • Vespasian ・ 6 hours ago

    Well the Indian government can consider a law similar to the EU Digital Market Acts that enforces such behaviour.

  • moralestapia ・ 7 hours ago

    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.

    • j_maffe ・ 6 hours ago

      They can and they have. It's the lock-in Meta is imposing that's preventing new options to succeed in the market.

      • moralestapia ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        If you have said this about Apple/Google, I would have said ... maaaaaayyybeeeeee ...

        But in this case, how exactly does Meta prevent people from India downloading and using another messaging app?

        • j_maffe ・ 6 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          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.

          • moralestapia ・ 6 hours ago

            What would you believe is a solution?

    • _dky ・ 6 hours ago

      I guess it is more about captured user base than the technology.

      What other differentiating factors can you implement that can steer the masses from one messaging platform to the other. I cannot think of any.

alex_duf ・ 7 hours ago

I wonder if that would allow Signal to become interoperable with Whatsapp?

  • djl0 ・ 6 hours ago

    FTA: As reported by Heise Online, Signal and Threema will not establish connections allowing for interoperability with WhatsApp.

  • lenerdenator ・ 6 hours ago

    I wouldn't want any cross-talk between my secure messaging app and anything that is owned by Meta.

    Your comms are only as secure as the node receiving them.

    • j_maffe ・ 6 hours ago

      Yes which is fine given that you get to choose what you send to which app.