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

WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

raw.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 69 posts

Re: WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

#31

Post by slig »

gamblor956 wrote: post #30
Jtsummers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but... With a sufficiently widespread third party library they risk a backlash with their userbase. Social networks depend so much on the network effect to bring in users that cutting out a large chunk of users all at once because the protocol changed could cause more users to drop out. Thinking about it, I wonder how much AIM and MSN Messenger's fights against third party clients messed up their user bases.

Their userbase uses the Whatsapp app that comes bundled with their phones on many intl carriers. I don't think they care about the 0.0001% of their userbase that uses third party clients.

Then one can build a client that mimics one very used bundled client. (so they can't just say "update or you can't log in anymore").

I know that you can't used the outdated version on Android for much longer without being cut off access.

Re: WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

#32

Post by Jtsummers »

gamblor956 wrote: post #30
Jtsummers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but... With a sufficiently widespread third party library they risk a backlash with their userbase. Social networks depend so much on the network effect to bring in users that cutting out a large chunk of users all at once because the protocol changed could cause more users to drop out. Thinking about it, I wonder how much AIM and MSN Messenger's fights against third party clients messed up their user bases.

Their userbase uses the Whatsapp app that comes bundled with their phones on many intl carriers. I don't think they care about the 0.0001% of their userbase that uses third party clients.

Presently, correct. But that's the risk of allowing third-party clients with an unpublished protocol spec. Right now they can break anything they want. If they don't limit third-party clients, their hands could become tied by too many people using it.

EDIT: Note: I'm not a fan of proprietary protocols. I'm just describing what I see as the position of a company that wants to monetize a network like this. If the network and client is the revenue source, then third party clients work against you. Allowing the third party clients to gain too large a share of your user base means that breaking compatibility could have significant network effects against you as those users move to another platform and bring their friends and family along.

Re: WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

#34

Post by ig1 »

skywhopper wrote: post #13
skywhopper wrote: post #8

Interesting. Trademark law is probably pretty strong against repositories named "WhatsApp" or something very similar. Using the logo without permission as well. Describing a project as "working with WhatsApp" would probably not be an actionable trademark infringement. Code that works with the WhatsApp API is almost certainly not "infringing", unless there's some "encryption" going on. Unfortunately the DMCA takedown…

That said, this complaint doesn't appear to me to be explicit enough to meet with GitHub's takedown policy ( https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy ), which requires "Identify the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed. The specificity of your identification may depend on the nature of the work you believe has been infringed, but may include things like a link to a web page or a specific post…

How would you propose they do that ? - there's nothing magical they can do that will identify official clients that third parties couldn't replicate.

Re: WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

#35

Post by imdsm »

ig1 wrote: post #34
skywhopper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, this complaint doesn't appear to me to be explicit enough to meet with GitHub's takedown policy ( https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy ), which requires "Identify the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed. The specificity of your identification may depend on the nature of the work you believe has been infringed, but may include things like a link to a web page or a specific post…

How would you propose they do that ? - there's nothing magical they can do that will identify official clients that third parties couldn't replicate.

Surely that is their problem?

Re: WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

#36

Post by instakill »

WizzleKake wrote: post #29

It looks like Github has pulled a bunch of the repos, including the ones that don't even have "WhatsApp" in their names. Is this because they had something like "compatible with WhatsApp" in their descriptions? If I were repository owners and/or paying customer of Github, I would not be OK with this.

I have a repo called whatsapp analyzer. Guess it was looked over.

Re: WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

#37

Post by xnyhps »

Jtsummers wrote: post #32
gamblor956 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their userbase uses the Whatsapp app that comes bundled with their phones on many intl carriers. I don't think they care about the 0.0001% of their userbase that uses third party clients.

Presently, correct. But that's the risk of allowing third-party clients with an unpublished protocol spec. Right now they can break anything they want. If they don't limit third-party clients, their hands could become tied by too many people using it. EDIT: Note: I'm not a fan of proprietary protocols. I'm just describing what I see as the position of a company that wants to monetize a network like this. If the netwo…

I don't think there ever was a serious risk for that for WhatsApp: multi-device support isn't just missing, they are actively making it a pain. There's no way to obtain your password, the password changes regularily, logging in with a second client kicks the old connection, etc.

So people would be forced to make a choice: use it on your phone, or on your computer. Aside from the group of people who don't have a smartphone, most people would chose phone.

Post reply on HN