why hasn't there been anything like this for iMessage? or any 3rd party applications at all, really.
Is iMessage even a thing outside the US? Everybody in Europe uses WA or Messenger, at least
I‘m from EU and prefer iMessage to anything else.
Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#12why hasn't there been anything like this for iMessage? or any 3rd party applications at all, really.
Is iMessage even a thing outside the US? Everybody in Europe uses WA or Messenger, at least
I'm from EU and it is a thing. I use iMessages whenever the other side has an iPhone. In my social circle, it's about two thirds. But it is also true that many people who have an iPhone still use Whatsapp or Messenger as the default communication channel even if the other side has an iPhone as well.
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is iMessage even a thing outside the US? Everybody in Europe uses WA or Messenger, at least
The iPhone has about a 56% market share in the US, compared to a 26% market share in Europe (with the UK being the outsider with 52% market share). That makes a huge difference: in Europe it's very unlikely that everyone out of any group of friends has an iPhone, making Whatsapp, Telegram etc the goto solutions for group messages. Apple is also huge in Japan, but I don't know what kind of chat apps are used there.
Line, mostly.
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#14why hasn't there been anything like this for iMessage? or any 3rd party applications at all, really.
A Signal gateway would be nice but an irc gateway to a e2e secure platform might constitute a reduction of security for all involved parties. There are jabber and slack gateways. In practicality,I would like to see a gitter to IRC gateway,because of foss projects usage of both platforms.
Check out matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge) which bridges gitter, irc and much more :-)
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#15why hasn't there been anything like this for iMessage? or any 3rd party applications at all, really.
I don't know whether this falls within that, but some people have made iMessage "versions" for Android by using a Mac computer as a bridge.
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#16It looks like this opens a copy of WhatsApp Web and instruments it as its client. And it uses compiled class names like `._2EZ_m` to interact with the DOM. Unless I'm missing something, this will probably break weekly or every time they release a new build of the frontend. Not sure if there's a better way?
One alternative is sandboxing the js code (or using existing browser or networking logging capabilities) to reverse engineer network requests and write a more raw client instead of piggybacking onto the web client, that would still have risks of changes but less likely than this.
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#17It looks like this opens a copy of WhatsApp Web and instruments it as its client. And it uses compiled class names like `._2EZ_m` to interact with the DOM. Unless I'm missing something, this will probably break weekly or every time they release a new build of the frontend. Not sure if there's a better way?
In my experience it doesn't break all that often. Once in a while it does, of course, but not weekly; and knowing the creator personally, I can say he uses it himself too, so any breakage will be fixed quite quickly (at least at the moment). ;)
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#18It looks like this opens a copy of WhatsApp Web and instruments it as its client. And it uses compiled class names like `._2EZ_m` to interact with the DOM. Unless I'm missing something, this will probably break weekly or every time they release a new build of the frontend. Not sure if there's a better way?
One alternative is sandboxing the js code (or using existing browser or networking logging capabilities) to reverse engineer network requests and write a more raw client instead of piggybacking onto the web client, that would still have risks of changes but less likely than this.
> reverse engineer network requests and write a more raw client
People already have done that. The most famous example is the yowsup [1] python library. The problem with these client implementations is that WhatsApp is banning any numbers that use them [2]. So most recent attempts to use WhatsApp outside of the official clients revolve around using WhatsApp Web somehow. That appears to work better, but even here if you are using it on a long term basis, WhatsApp might ban you.
Ultimately, WhatsApp is a bad host when it comes to using their service outside of the official app. This is really sad for people like me who don't want to install WhatsApp on their phones because it sends too much of my data to Facebook... probably that's precisely why they are so strict, to get all the data because that's all they get (the service is gratis after all). That and spam.
[1]: https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup [2]: http://google.com/search?q=yowsup+name+ban
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#19It looks like this opens a copy of WhatsApp Web and instruments it as its client. And it uses compiled class names like `._2EZ_m` to interact with the DOM. Unless I'm missing something, this will probably break weekly or every time they release a new build of the frontend. Not sure if there's a better way?
That specific classname didn't change since the beginning of the project, I had a breaking change on WhatsApp's side one time (was several months ago already).
I'm aware of https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-whatsapp which I'm personally interested in, which uses a reverse engineered implementation of the WhatsApp web protocol.
Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Signal gateway would be nice but an irc gateway to a e2e secure platform might constitute a reduction of security for all involved parties. There are jabber and slack gateways. In practicality,I would like to see a gitter to IRC gateway,because of foss projects usage of both platforms.
Check out matterbridge ( https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge ) which bridges gitter, irc and much more :-)
Neat,thanks.