Live data from Hacker News

BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

birdy.chat

151–160 of 517 posts

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

#151
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.

Doesn't this signal thing require a phone number?

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

#152
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing. Wait, you mean passing feel-good legislation has knock-on effects? Who would have thought?

That is not the case here. The legislation has been drafted with all of this in mind, and will force Meta to continually improve until the feature is like it should be.

Without Trump making a huge fuss everytime US companies have to do something that can hurt their monopolies, we'd probably already be there

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

#153
post #77
post #35

I can vibecode this in an hour.

My new favorite breed of commenters are AI bros who go around lamenting how trivial other peoples' work is, while they themselves fail to create anything that anyone else actually wants to use

Based on other comments it is bad enough to be vibe coded :)

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

#154
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the name? Some cultural reference I'm not getting?

It just sounds—let's say—too playful. Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea. That might just be me, not sure.

What would they think about a “Slack” at work

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

#155
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Countermeasure: set up four microphones some distance apart, use autocorrelation to pinpoint the sound sources, and then isolate them, recovering the "masked" speech. The countercountermeasure would be to fully surround your mouth and vocal tract with an active noise cancelling system and then produce noise (to push whatever little sound gets through far below the noise floor: the signal is unpredictable enough that you can't use averaging techniques to recover it). The countercountercountermeasure would be to use a camera in the radio band to look at the vocal tract directly, using the phone as a light source, and recover the phonemes that way. The countercountercountercountermeasure would be to construct an isolated box… at which point you're no longer having a voice call in public: you have a portable privacy booth.

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

#156
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format? I think now they have some bullshit proprietary paid cloud storage solution (why not let me use the cloud I already pay for?), but for years they haven't had any solution for iOS at all. Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up having to use & fix some Github project that simulated Signal's transfer protocol to simulate a…

Any time an app has bizarre functionality gap on iOS, I assume it's because of Apple's anti-consumer bullshit app restrictions. No idea if that's actually what's going on, but Apple thinks of their devices as appliances and hates when apps offer pro-customer features.

No. The Signal developers opted out of iOS's backup and export features.

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

#157
post #10

How does this work with end to end encryption? Just out of curiosity

Sorry to be "that guy", because I don't know the details of how WhatsApp does E2EE, but in any proper (as in secure and private) implementation the only thing that should matter is whether the client follows the spec? You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?

The only thing that matter is whether you trust the app or not.

- If it is proprietary, you just have to blindly trust it (as is the case with WhatsApp currently: they say it is end-to-end encrypted, but you can't verify).

- If it is open source, then some people will want to understand how it works before they trust it. Other will either blindly trust (like for proprietary software) or trust that persons they trust understood how it works and were convinced.

> You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?

Well, exactly. I am interested in how the WhatsApp interop works just as I am interested in how HTTPS works.

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

#158
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words aren't important. The regulated meaning is. Does it have a legal meaning? If so, what is it? Who enforces it? Consider made in Italy vs made in Germany are different in meaningful aspects.

Is there even a regulated meaning to "made in X"? The way I see it, "made in Europe" may be dubious, but "made in EU" should be just as okay to write as "made in USA". And if it's not a thing, well, nothing is a thing until people make it a thing. EDIT: also we're talking about a software product here, where most things written on the product is legally meaningless - otherwise we'd have special customs regimes for th…

As my comment implied, there is in some places, but the regulations aren't uniform. Also, the person I responded to mentioned supermarket products. I was asking legitimate questions & was hoping to get an informed response.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing. And so do the courts. Give them some time to cook. How goes the popular American saying: We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way.

> Give them some time to cook How long? I'm still waiting for the GDPR to actually be enforced meaningfully.

You can get some really hefty fines for not playing by the rules. It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe. It's not enforced hard enough against US company empires like meta and the like unfortunately, but it absolutely works.

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

#160
post #48
post #7

This is pretty amazing, but I wish they picked a better name for it. I have a feeling that a good amount of people will dismiss it just because of the name.

What's wrong with the name? "WhatsApp" sounds pretty dumb to me, too, but it's entrenched in the social consciousness, so we don't really think about it. (The name even has nothing to do with chat; originally WhatsApp was a way to share your "current status"; "WhatsApp" sounds like "what's up?".)

Birdy evokes the same energy as "BabySeal". I imagine you can understand why an app called "BabySealChat" would be off-putting to a thirty-something disgruntled developer?
Post reply on HN