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Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

blog.whatsapp.com

211–220 of 228 posts

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they may store on servers behind the scene at least for speed and performance. Yes, that's why I think so. They easily loads all the messages and images in just few seconds even when my phone's internet is too slow. They won't let you use the web app when you're phone is disconnected, so there's no way to confirm it.

In order to use Whatsapp Web you need to be on the same wifi network as your phone. Your phone has the data on it. Intranet speeds on most wifi networks these days is faster than 50Mbps. That's more than fast enough to transfer all your messages and photos with little to no lag. It doesn't matter how fast your connection to the WWW is because you're not using the WWW to transfer the data, you're using the wifi intran…

It will work over a mobile connection, using wifi is only recommended to save data usage.

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#212
post #72
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp was bought for $19 billion. You could probably pay $1 billion and get a couple of different systems that worked well enough to replace WhatsApp.

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.

The $19 billion paid wasn't for their amazingly well engineered system, it was for their massive user base.

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#213

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…

What did they use to make the desktop app, I wonder. Maybe _electron 1.0_?!?

They did use electron. Confirmed by viewing `/Applications/WhatsApp.app/Contents/Frameworks/Electron*`

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get smart phones for like $20 and if they are not used for anything the service costs are like $5/mo

Unless you live in Canada.

Check out 7-11, they had some good deals on low-usage phones last time I needed one.

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#216
post #181
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood me. I was talking about MY case. Not "hundreds of millions of people"

" If the Whatsapp team actually tracked the rate of user engagement with these Desktop/Web editions & compared this to the Smartphone/Tablet apps. They would agree with you. " Surely you are talking about them tracking the rate of user engagement across their userbase, not just the data of you alone?

ok. u got me.

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#217
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't explain them actively blocking google voice numbers. Or home phone numbers (landlines) for that matter. Let people use a landline number on a tablet.

I've had it working perfectly well with my google voice number for years now. When did they start blocking it? The only problem I recall is that the initial text verification doesn't work - I had to do the phone call option - but this is a problem with gvoice, not WhatsApp: google blocks pretty much all server-triggered texts.

I ported my Cingular/AT&T number to Google Voice many years ago and six months ago ported it to Ting. There are a number of companies who consistently fail to deliver texts to that number. The most notable (for me) is Amazon. Yet dozens of other companies (Facebook, Google, etc.) are able to use it just fine.

I don't have the slightest idea on how to fix it. The only reason it worries me a bit is that I might miss texts from other people.

Switched to an iPhone so I could use "Find Friends" with spouse and kids.

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#218

I was excited when I saw the headline but the phone teathering is a deal breaker. I removed whatsapp from my phone precisely because it took up too much space, with all the photos and videos being shared daily. It's a shame really.. a desktop app would've been a great alternative

An app without tethering would be great, I agree. But to save space on your phone, it's easy to turn off automatic storage of media, on iOS this is under Settings > Chats > Save Incoming Media. I've had it turned off for a long time to stop my camera roll filling with meme pics.

Thanks

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#219
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither does iMessage store messages on servers, and yet I receive iMessages on every device I signed on.

But you can't retrieve historical iMessages on a new device.

I'm not really asking for that feature. If I could send and receive messages on the computer without having to open the smartphone app every five minutes for it to restore the connection, I would be happy already;

Re: Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App

#220

Why is the app closing completely if I press 'x'? wouldn't be much better to stay in background mode like Slack does (well and many other chat clients)? It's annoying... I'll keep using my custom wrapper with NW.js (apparently this uses electron) until this behaviour is implemented...

pro tip: you can do cmd+h to hide all windows
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