151–160 of 228 posts
Why is Facebook/WhatsApp doing the tether to the phone crap? I have a few seniors in the family who have no need of a cellphone (stay at home most of the time). Everyone else in the family uses WhatsApp and these poor people are left out of the look. It is completely stupid as far as I can see. What is the phone requirement buying them?
It's required because your phone is where your messages are stored. Whatsapp don't retain messages/media after they've been delivered to your phone, which is a compelling privacy feature for many. It's also what allows them to serve such an enormous user base with limited hardware. Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c…
For consumers (and facebook is a consumer company) it's all about who owns mobile (and can also compete with facebook). They want desktop to just be enough of a feature to be more appealing than other platforms, but not enough that it detracts from mobile.
1/ phone tethering is the price to pay for end-to-end encryption: the support of multiple devices is not compatible with perfect forward secrecy, as the former require the asynchronous push of messages to all devices while PFS requires synchronicity (at least some kind of, as explained in their white paper here: https://lobste.rs/s/sx2f0r/whatsapp_encryption_overview_tech... 2/ if you don't like the Desktop App (or a…
No it doesn't. Multiple devices is a special case of multiple recipients, which the Signal protocol handles (and I presume Whatsapp does as well). See more details here (https://whispersystems.org/blog/private-groups/)
Now, that doesn't mean it already works in Signal/Whatsapp, because they have other constraints. But it's not PFS that prevents it.
It seems to be nothing more than https://web.whatsapp.com/ in a web view. So I can't really see interest.
I previously created my own "native" app from this by wrapping https://web.whatsapp.com in an Electron wrapper so that I could have WhatsApp live separate from the browser, with it's own Dock icon. Some ways in which the official app is better: * The official app extends to the edges of the window, whereas the web app has a "window on a background" design, which takes up more space. * The official app has keyboard sh…
I'll keep using my custom wrapper with NW.js (apparently this uses electron) until this behaviour is implemented...
Windows 8 minimum? Is this an UWP app or what's the reasoning here? Edit: I downloaded and successfully launched this on Windows 7. It seems like a standard Electron app. Now I wonder if the Windows 8 requirement is purely for tech support reasons, or if there's some specific feature that would fail on Windows 7.
Is this a rip off from ChitChat? https://github.com/stonesam92/ChitChat
"A Mac app wrapper around WhatsApp's web client, WhatsApp Web. https://web.whatsapp.com/"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I previously created my own "native" app from this by wrapping https://web.whatsapp.com in an Electron wrapper so that I could have WhatsApp live separate from the browser, with it's own Dock icon. Some ways in which the official app is better: * The official app extends to the edges of the window, whereas the web app has a "window on a background" design, which takes up more space. * The official app has keyboard sh…
We used to do this with Fluid.app in the naughties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense because people give up their phone numbers from time to time. I did this myself. My understanding is that someone who claims my number cannot access my past data. But if it is "stateless" then a phone number doesn't have to be the only identifier. They can also use email. Heck .. here is an algorithm ... use phone number 555XXXXXXX .. take a person's email address and hash it to…
I guess if the point is for them not to store your messages on their servers once those messages have been delivered, how is WhatsApp to know whether to send a message to the session logged in from your phone, or to the desktop app with a different session, or to your work computer where you forgot to log out? Being able to sync across all your devices requires they start storing all of your communications centrally,…
But i found whatsapp is next to mp3 in my and my friends phone so it is not easy from bandwidth perspective
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having read the engineering posts about their core systems I think you're being wildly optimistic in the same way as people who think "writing a general CMS can't be that hard, I'll just write my own" are.
You could build 17.2 WhatsApps for $1 billion, assuming that it took nothing more and nothing less than the $58 million in funding they raised: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp#/entity .