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BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

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

#241

Post by qubex »

jordemort wrote: post #170

I'm pretty resentful that people in the US are stuck using worse/less featureful versions of products from US companies, while the government in Europe can get these kinds of concessions for their people. If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well, since we can't be bothered otherwise to pass any of these…

It can go both ways: for example in the EU Apple disallows mirroring of iPhones on Macs because of its interpretation of EU statutes, though it occurred at the same time as they were required to support third-party app stores, so I strongly suspect it was a bit of ‘FU’ to the EU.

But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)

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

#242

Post by jeroenhd »

drcongo wrote: post #63
nozzlegear wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they lobby for an exemption, or is that just how the law is written?

I might be misremembering, but I think iMessage implementing RCS was the compromise.

iMessage isn't popular enough in Europe to be broken up by the DMA from what I recall.

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

#243

Post by bruce343434 »

Never heard of this before. Why would I use this? I am assuming the messages are not actually encrypted, because on their own privacy page they state that they "process" messages and attachments sent through birdychat. So are they processing the raw unencrypted data on their servers or what?

From a cursory glance of their CSAE policy, combined with the above, it seems they would be very eager to comply with the dreaded "chat control".

https://www.birdy.chat/privacy

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

#244

Post by jolmg »

Nextgrid wrote: post #104
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 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…

> Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format?

> I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.

That doesn't fix anything, does it?

Last time I tried to export a years-long WhatsApp chat, I was only able to export a few-weeks-worth, IIRC. WhatsApp chat exports also don't include media. It's just a txt file. The backup is limited to using Google and it's done in such a way that you're not allowed to download it yourself.

The only way to export the chat was to use the web client and scroll all the way to the top, then copy-paste the HTML out of web-inspector once everything loaded. I don't think that's possible anymore. IIRC, the web client now tops at some point with a message like "use the Android app to look further back".

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

#245

Post by my_throwaway23 »

thebiblelover7 wrote: post #228
my_throwaway23 wrote: post #108

While not a commercial offering, which is what this is saying in reality - closed source, commercial alternative with (limited) interoperability, I've been running my own chat server for a while now with (limited) interoperability with both Whatsapp and Messenger. I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice , and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don…

How have you been running it? How did you make it interoperable?

I'm using Element Synapse with the Mautrix bridges. They're all a pain to setup, with a ton of required configuration options each, but once setup, it's mostly transparent where any one chat originates. Reactions, emojis, media, it all just works.

The downside, of course, is that voice and video will not work.

Oh, and perhaps a ton of initial invitations, one for every conversation you have open.

There are open servers you can join, with the bridges enabled, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose. At that point you might as well use a commercial, closed-source offering, as, ironically, a corporation with a large footprint you can sue. Average Joe with an AWS instance you might not be able to track down, should your data leak.

https://github.com/element-hq/synapse

https://github.com/mautrix/meta

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

#246

Post by jeroenhd »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #41
snowmobile wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the suspicion is based on this app being offered in a region whose government is hostile to privacy and this implementation being connected with the strong nativist bent in Europe. The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider mu…

> Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU

The integration is only possible because the EU forced Meta's hand. The law only applies to massive digital empires with gatekeeper levels of control.

I don't think the EU would mind at all if Meta would permit American companies to interoperate with them. Meta won't just permit it, they have to protect their WhatsApp Business money machine of course.

That's also why the feature is only available to EU numbers. Not because BirdyChat hates Australians, but because WhatsApp won't permit them to send messages to numbers from those countries.

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

#247

Post by xvedejas »

nozzlegear wrote: post #222
hei-lima wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common. I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group. The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to…

SMS isn't widespread in the US, iMessage is.

It all depends on age group in my experience. My friends all a bit older than me prefer Messenger for everything. My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. I think my parents and their generation use iMessage, but I use WhatsApp with them. My generation used to use snapchat a lot, I think, but I never got on that boat.

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

#248

Post by jeroenhd »

ivm wrote: post #167
palata wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm old, but there is nothing I use in WhatsApp that does not exist in Signal. What are you missing there?

Various group features like communities and group voice chats, public channels, voice message transcription, only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own, backup is still marked as beta in 2026, no business features while all business here use WhatsApp in one way or another…

I don't use any of the other features (in fact, I actively avoid them and would disable them if they ever came to Signal), but:

> only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031836512-St...

> backup is still marked as beta

Also, local backups haven't been beta for ages. The free cloud backups are the ones that are new.

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

#249

Post by DanOpcode »

my_throwaway23 wrote: post #108

While not a commercial offering, which is what this is saying in reality - closed source, commercial alternative with (limited) interoperability, I've been running my own chat server for a while now with (limited) interoperability with both Whatsapp and Messenger. I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice , and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don…

Would be interesting to hear how it works what you have built.

Edit: Saw your other comment now.

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

#250

Post by uyzstvqs »

drnick1 wrote: post #175

It would have been more effective to require Meta (and all other messaging companies) to implement an open protocol or open source theirs, so that people can freely write alternative clients free of malware.

A custom API is the only way for a platform to extend its native E2EE sessions and features to other platforms. Making those APIs completely open would become a major spam problem, which would likely end them up in the same situation as SMTP, where small servers are blocked-by-default by big providers.

Interoperability by agreement between legitimate messaging services, using custom APIs is the only realistic and secure way to accomplish this.

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