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WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

andregarzia.com

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Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#51

Post by coldtea »

bikamonki wrote: post #41

Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network? How about widely used programming languages and frameworks? Flash for cool web effects anyone? The web is open, open wins. No matter how monolithic a market leader i…

>Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history.

The only lesson from history is that all tecnologies succumb at some point. General infrastructure standards (like TCP/IP or HTTP) persist longer, but that doesn't say much for application level technologies.

>Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%?

If anything that's a counter-example. Netscape, that "now has less than 10%" is the open source version. It had that 90% when it was proprietary. Besides, the current 2 big players that trump Firefox in users (Chrome and IE) are proprietary too.

>Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network?

Yeah, it got pwned by Apple and Android. Of which Apple, which is proprietary, has most of the smartphone profits, and Android has a lot of the share, mostly in lower cost phones. Not really about open vs closed. Meebo, a totally open phone never got anywhere, and neither did Mozilla's phone attempts.

>Flash for cool web effects anyone?

What about it? It dominated its niche of the market for like 15 years. If it dies its mostly because of general incompetence by Adobe. They never managed to create a mobile version that doesn't suck donkey's balls for one. They also died because a proprietary platform make a decision not to include it (iOS), which is not really about "open" winning.

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#52

Post by jshevek »

bikamonki wrote: post #41

Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. Remember that 'default' browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat/email network? How about widely used programming languages and frameworks? Flash for cool web effects anyone? The web is open, open wins. No matter how monolithic a market leader i…

We are still in the early days of computer technology. There may be thousands of examples from the last 50 years that support your line of thinking here, but I'm not convinced that this will be true, always, in the future.

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#53

Post by soapdog »

coldtea wrote: post #47

So? Why should WhatsApp "understand" the web?

Because they are claiming that they released a "web client" that doesn't actually work on the web but only on a single browser and is not independent (it requires a mobile app running on a phone connected to the internet).

People release crippled software on the web because they don't understand what it is all about. The day we lose interoperability between browsers it will all be doomed. The fact that most of the websites work well on the top browsers is a victory that only those that lived thru the 90s will appreciate in its full glory. ;-)

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#54

Post by tedunangst »

nostrademons wrote: post #24
andrewbarba wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Heh, so WhatsApp is the real SnapChat? The one that actually deletes your messages once read?

Did snapchat not delete messages?

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#55

Post by bazookajoes »

alganet wrote: post #50
bazookajoes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that the reason is that WhatsApp wants to make sure that the person behind using the web client is really the person behind the number. This is same reason Whatsapp has no api. They don't want the bot problem that tinder has. People think the value of Whatsapp is that it is so pervasive. That's a big part of the value, but so much of the value is that whatsapp knows who you really are. You might have a few…

In Brazil (same place as the post author), some people do have many WhatsApp accounts. New number SIM cards cost equivalent to $3 dollars and dual SIM smartphones are very popular. Many people use these SIMs in a disposable way, changing them as telecoms change their prices.

That's true, but in my experience you have one at a time. For south east asia it's normal to have one SIM for your local number and one SIM for your international number. Or just SIMs for different networks so that you can get free calls to friends who are the same network. But even then people usually have only one whatapp account at a time.

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#56

Post by Aldo_MX »

rtpg wrote: post #30
soapdog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't needed to go these route. Telegram for example has clients for most platforms and a web client that works in every browser and doesn't require your phone to be connected to the internet for it to work.

Telegram is a bad counter-example for various reasons. LINE has a desktop client that works well though

> for various reasons

[Citation needed]

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#58

Post by matthewgifford »

soapdog wrote: post #2

Author here, will monitor this thread waiting for feedback and general comments.

I'm wondering if you're aware that WhatsApp's data store is on the phone, not on their servers. If so, how would you do away with the requirement that the phone stay online while using the web client?

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#59

Post by rtpg »

ceocoder wrote: post #33
rtpg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram is a bad counter-example for various reasons. LINE has a desktop client that works well though

Just curious - I remember some debate here about Telegram bug bounty from a while ago, other than that haven't seen any good/bad press about it. Why is it bad counter-example?

It's a client that explicitly about security and openness, so a lot of things are going to be "self-evidently" supported. The objective is to make a good client

The objective of clients like LINE and WhatsApp are to make good chat for the masses. This can come at various technical costs, because that's not their objective, whereas Telegram is , at its core, about technology.

Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

#60

Post by jshevek »

azakai wrote: post #37
iamdanfox wrote: post #4

I would be interested to understand more about why WhatsApp made some of those decisions. The requirement to keep your phone connected to the Internet seems strange, perhaps it's using some encryption key that never leaves the device? Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much? Why has iOS been left out?

> Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much? There is nothing the FileSystem API can do that others cannot, although it might be less convenient or less optimized. Even that shouldn't be true any more, but it still might in some browsers. Regardless, this was a wrong decision by WhatsApp. FileSystem is no longer standards track. The API document itself says > "Work on this document has been discontinued…

>> which shows a lack of respect for the standards process.

Interesting phrasing.

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