Author here, will monitor this thread waiting for feedback and general comments.
Hate the gifs.. Made the article almost unreadable.. Just have them loop once or twice when I scroll to that part of the article.
WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#12If all of this is true, its worse then I expected and I did not expect much. Why do all these companys wage a war against third party, even from a buissness perspective I don't get it. It creates innovation that you can copy for the offical app and its a perfect to test new features.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#13Apple has ushered in a new era in which a high level of centralized control is considered acceptable to consumers.
WhatsApp is obviously trying to keep total control, like apple.
This doesn't explain all of their failings here. For example, I'm sure they will eventually find ways to address their control issues and still be usable in other browsers.
They might never do a web interface that runs in iOS, due to apple's own controling approach. Of course there is still the whatsapp iOS app.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#14> Your phone needs to stay connected to the internet for our web client to work...
What? Is this true? I can't think of a reason why their devs would ever need the users phone to be online.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
> perhaps it's using some encryption key that never leaves the device Don't they support multiple devices already (running the client on both a phone and a tablet)? Maybe they don't want to have this run on a desktop (either via API or JavaScript), because then curious people might reverse engineer it. Sort of like how Netflix has clients on locked-down Linux-based devices but doesn't support Linux desktops.
Netflix now works in Chrome on Linux.
Which is a damn shame because only supporting Chrome is absurd. We've advanced so far, but now instead of "Works best in Internet Explorer 6 at 800x600" it's "Works in Chrome."
The more things change the more they stay the same...
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#16Author here, will monitor this thread waiting for feedback and general comments.
I have mixed feelings about the gifs.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#17> Your phone needs to stay connected to the internet for our web client to work... What? Is this true? I can't think of a reason why their devs would ever need the users phone to be online.
WhatsApp does not store messages on their servers. It's a clean passthrough from one device to the next. They only hold onto message until all clients in the group text or one-on-one text have received the sent message. So, if you have two clients using the same phone number, the system wouldn't know when it is able to delete the message. Right now the single phone receives the message and simply passes it up to the web browser. It's a simple solution that fits into their data model. They claim that they cannot get this working on iOS which prior to iOS 7 may have been true. However, on iOS 7 and above we can run code (even async network calls) when we receive a push notification so they should have been able to work with that API to produce similar results.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#18> Your phone needs to stay connected to the internet for our web client to work... What? Is this true? I can't think of a reason why their devs would ever need the users phone to be online.
I believe the webapp retrieves your message history from the phone in real time, and Whatsapp does not store messages on their servers once they have been delivered.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#19Wasn't Whatsapp's success attributed to their policy of inclusion (all major mobile platform/devices). This seems like coming from a different company altogether.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#20Hrmm I really like the web client. It's not great (image viewer is really small) but serves my needs perfectly
I agree, 90% of my serious daily communication (i.e. not IRC) is done via Whatsapp. I can't explain how horribly annoying is to have to pull out my cell phone and write in that tiny screen every time I want to send a message.