Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

birdy.chat

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 517 posts

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#121

Post by londons_explore »

blell wrote: post #117
poisonborz wrote: post #31

Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist. Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.

Any company can ask for interoperatibility with whatsapp. None of them are, because it's obviously against their interests. The DMA will change nothing in this regard because the "many apps" approach is the most beneficial to users.

> because it's obviously against their interests.

Why? I'd love to be an alternative whatsapp client with all kinds of new features that the official client doesn't have. Obviously you say you're building a compatible chat network, but the reality is users are just using your client to talk to whatsapp users.

Eg. one feature I'd love is some AI to automatically take any date and time someone mentions to me and put it as a draft event in my calendar. I miss so many events from big group chats I'm not paying proper attention to and suddenly everyone is saying "Whoa, you didn't come to Johns 50th birthday?!? Why not? We invited you months ago[in a group chat with 100 messages a day of mostly memes]"

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#122

Post by maqp »

aduwah wrote: post #69

I was a big fan of pidgin, but this premise makes me feel iffy. Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own. Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day. Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion

The unfortunate problem with Pidgin is you don't have proper cross-platform E2EE chats, especially for groups. OTR is terribly outdated with its 1536-bit FFDH. These days the security margin sits at 2048-bit minimum, 3072-bit recommended. OMEMO might work but it's just not a standard. Good thing Signal made the whole thing just work.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#123

Post by londons_explore »

lurk2 wrote: post #106
input_sh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, what about three sentences above that one? > Before Haiket, Alex founded a number of technology start-ups and helped develop innovative voice solutions for Facebook and Google. At the very least, I think it's safe to say he has some connections within Meta that he utilised for this purpose. He's definitely not a complete outsider whose startup (with no actual product) just happened to be picked by Meta.

> what about three sentences above that one? My bad. I searched for “Meta” instead of “Facebook.” Quite a few other red flags in that press release. > Haiket is launching the Beta trial from today, with a pipeline of future innovation for early adopters, including a pioneering silencing technology that will allow users to speak privately in public, with voice communication that only your device can hear.

> voice communication that only your device can hear.

This is fairly straightforward - you have the device spew out noise with similar characteristics to human speech (ie. random overlapping syllables in the speaker's voice). Take a recording then subtract the random syllables.

Only your device can do the subtraction, because only your device knows the waveform it transmitted.

Obviously in a room with lots of reverb this will be a bit harder, since you will also need to subtract the reflection of what was transmitted with a room profile and deal with the phone moving in the room, but it sounds far from impossible.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#124

Post by altern8 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #75
altern8 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same thing. I also don't think there's such a thing as "made in Europe", as if it was "made in USA". Is it made in Germany, Italy, Albania..?

Surely it's very similar, companies can't - AFAIK - be registered in USA, they're registered in a state. USA's States have different tax and legislative climates, just like EU states do.

Sure, but the U.S. are a single country, while Europe is many different countries that are completely different.

I'm in Poland and can drive 2 hours and stop understanding what people are saying to me (in German and Czech).

That was my point.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#125

Post by ivm »

vpShane wrote: post #88

This means nothing good, Meta and its products are a privacy nightmare, with WhatsApp having major market share outside of the U.S. People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available. No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.

Signal's UX is years behind even modern WhatsApp, let alone Telegram, which is closer to a blogging or social platform. We can't expect mass adoption of such a clunky app simply because it's more private – it has never worked that way.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#126

Post by altern8 »

ncruces wrote: post #74
altern8 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same thing. I also don't think there's such a thing as "made in Europe", as if it was "made in USA". Is it made in Germany, Italy, Albania..?

Plenty of supermarket products say made in Europe, particularly (but not only) white label products.

Maybe "made in the EU"..? That is not the same thing as "made in Europe".

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#127

Post by altern8 »

LexiMax wrote: post #116
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp would have to be the extreme example of this. I used to recommend Krita to people, despite it being less appropriate for photo editing, just to avoid using 'Gimp' in work/polite scenarios. I agree - "Birdy" is the name used with infants when talking about birds, or is a bird toy that photographers use to distract people ... which is a bit too close to the truth, perhaps. To me it also suggests 'a toy version of…

Somehow I feel like GIMP's lack of popularity has more to do with its reputation for having a horrendous and impenetrable interface than its name. At one point in the recent past there was a fork of GIMP named "Glimpse," yet weren't a sudden influx of users who were waiting for a more polite name.

I would say both.

BUT, lack of users might just be that it's too late, now. People use web-based tools like Figma, I wouldn't think a lot of people are looking for a Photoshop alternative.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#128

Post by poisonborz »

blell wrote: post #117
poisonborz wrote: post #31

Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist. Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.

Any company can ask for interoperatibility with whatsapp. None of them are, because it's obviously against their interests. The DMA will change nothing in this regard because the "many apps" approach is the most beneficial to users.

> obviously against their interests

Would love to know how it is "obviously" against my interest to make a chat app and have 3.3 billion users adressable instantly. Bad for internet health to be still tied to Meta, sure, but the damage was done and this is a way to reverse it.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#130

Post by palata »

jorvi wrote: post #102
Bratmon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never got cookie popups right. What makes you so confident?

They got cookie pop-ups right, current rules: - the default choice needs to be "strictly necessary cookies - with other less prominent buttons for "allow all" and "deny all" - a site is not allowed to force you to have the press a bunch of buttons or select a bunch of things to deny most/all cookies The problem lies in enforcement. Unless you are a huge player, there is almost nil chance you're gonna get fined. I thi…

> The problem lies in enforcement. Unless you are a huge player, there is almost nil chance you're gonna get fined.

I am curious: why is that difficult? Define the fine as a percentage of the revenue of the company, have users report links, and pay someone to check the link and send the fine.

Sounds like easy money... I mean it's very profitable to pay people to check parking lots and fine drivers who don't follow the regulations. This should be even more profitable?

Post reply on HN