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Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

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Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

#31

Post by octorian »

est31 wrote: post #18
toxicFork wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

3rd party implementations, such as that python library, have two fundamental issues (beyond what's mentioned here).

1) They're using outdated versions of the protocols, which they won't be motiviated to fix until those old versions are cut off server-side and their implementation suddenly stops working. 2) They never quite figured out how to correctly handle all the nuances and corner cases of the E2E encryption, so that part of their design is extremely fragile (just look at the issue trackers for all the evidence of this that you need).

On top of all that, the maintainers have basically given up and abandoned the projects... So they're not even being actively maintained.

Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

#32

Post by octorian »

askthrowaway wrote: post #23

My solution was to run WhatsApp in emulator and enable adb over tcp and send adb commands from server directly to emulator. I automate sending messages and pdf files from our erp system. and for receiving messages we just have a Whatsapp web available for one of our employee so he can reply and escalate whatever.

What's a shame here is that the "WhatsApp Business API Client" [1] would actually be the perfect tool for personal projects like this. Unfortunately, its still being reserved for use by only larger businesses planning to use it at scale, so they can be meaningfully paying customers.

Offering low-volume non-customer-facing free access to a product like this would likely make everyone here quite happy.

[1]: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/getting-starte...

Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

#35

Post by Carpetsmoker »

octorian wrote: post #32
askthrowaway wrote: post #23

My solution was to run WhatsApp in emulator and enable adb over tcp and send adb commands from server directly to emulator. I automate sending messages and pdf files from our erp system. and for receiving messages we just have a Whatsapp web available for one of our employee so he can reply and escalate whatever.

What's a shame here is that the "WhatsApp Business API Client" [1] would actually be the perfect tool for personal projects like this. Unfortunately, its still being reserved for use by only larger businesses planning to use it at scale, so they can be meaningfully paying customers. Offering low-volume non-customer-facing free access to a product like this would likely make everyone here quite happy. [1]: https://dev…

> Offering low-volume non-customer-facing free access to a product like this would likely make everyone here quite happy.

I suspect that one reason they're not doing that is to prevent spambots. This is probably a valid concern, as experience as shown that preventing spam is a hard problem.

Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

#37

Post by jaimehrubiks »

sopooneo wrote: post #22
est31 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

How can the server component of WhatsApp tell that the client is using the Python library you mention? If that library implements the protocol correctly, shouldn't it be indistinguishable from the official web client to the server?

This was an incredibly interesting topic when pokemon go came out. People started using the reverse engieered protocol to gain information about the map from the pc (instead of the official android app), and Niantic updated the app every now and then with slight protocol changes and complex functions or crypto algorithms so that it was harder for those people to perfectly emulate the client. The protocol worked, but they could detect them sometimes because it was not identical.

I feel that I love this topic. It seems that it is an exciting challenge trying to protect an API to only be used (or at least, detected if not) by the official app. I don't even know if there is even a 'solution' to this problem. Would like to read more about it.

Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

#38

Post by madeofpalk »

wongarsu wrote: post #8
yzb wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

idk, most people I know here in the UK have both iPhones and WhatsApp. Back in Australia, iPhones is fairly pervasive, and so is WhatsApp.

Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

#39

Post by baroffoos »

isoprophlex wrote: post #21
airstrike wrote: post #5

Time to finally add a bot to my WhatsApp group chat!

My thoughts exactly! What do you recommend in terms of IRC bot building tools?

There are a whole bunch of tools but you really only want something simple that gives you an infinite loop that runs every time a message comes in and gives you access to the current message as an object

Re: Show HN: Whapp-irc – A simple WhatsApp IRC gateway

#40

Post by baroffoos »

yzb wrote: post #3
coldsauce wrote: post #2

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

Its certainly not the default in Australia. Only a few people I know have iPhones. SMS is always the default messaging app unless you have added the person on something else which is a bit of a mess between different services.
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