121–130 of 132 posts
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?
Some initial investigation at Mozilla suggests it's to detect whether you're in Chrome's Incognito mode.
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All the nerds here only think about standards etc. Don't forget whatsapp is a company and it has to protect its market. Without controlling all the clients, whatsapp is worth a lot less.
By that logic any e-mail service should be incompatible with the rest, but that's clearly idiotic and no one would try arguing it. Try also imagining that your mobile carrier would tell you that by no means you are allowed to call to users of another carrier, since that would not "protect their market". Would you ever use such? When it comes to instant messaging however some lose common sense and start thinking that…
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By that logic any e-mail service should be incompatible with the rest, but that's clearly idiotic and no one would try arguing it. Try also imagining that your mobile carrier would tell you that by no means you are allowed to call to users of another carrier, since that would not "protect their market". Would you ever use such? When it comes to instant messaging however some lose common sense and start thinking that…
You are comparing two different things. Email is a generic concept - it's not proprietary . A message sent through Whatsapp is an instance of the whatsapp application - not a standard message. Basically, if we push your analysis further, Facebook, which is a communication application, should let you send a message to your twitter account, that you could read with twitter, and reply with a comment on an Instagram pict…
Concepts can't be proprietary altogether. You can't own ideas. Instant messaging isn't proprietary either.
> A message sent through Whatsapp is an instance of the whatsapp application - not a standard message.
If you are talking about certain implementation of ideas being proprietary - that's exactly the point of my original comment. Making it intentionally incompatible to "control the market" is crooked lock-in tactic. Which is especially the case with Whatsapp which internally uses XMPP which was designed for interoperability and as IETF standard.
And I brought examples with e-mail. A long time ago Compuserve and AOL e-mail services used to be incompatible on purpose. But pressure from users to end that stupidity forced them to reconsider. There is no valid reason that a lot of IM services can't interoperate to a good degree. Except for greed and backwards thinking.
This web client, even in it's current horrific form, is something I really needed. Many a times I find myself working on my laptop, with the phone carelessly lying somewhere else in the room. It's a pain to go find it when a new message arrives. The bottomline is, I guess WhatsApp doesn't need a Web Client to compete with other services. If you've been to India, you will realize how pervasive WhatsApp is, with or wit…
I am 100% agreed with what you said. But I have problem with the way they have implemented it as of now. I mean to use it via web I need to scan the qr code every time. Plus my phone needs to stay connected to internet. In India you can easily find lots of whatsapp users who wishes to use whatsapp via PC just because they dont have net pack on their phone. Hope they remove this restriction soon.
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> The fact that a given closed tech is winning does in fact support my argument: open wins, eventually. Huh? I fail to see the logic behind this. > And the fact that protocols and standards prevail is precisely because they need to be open to become protocols and standards. Well, yes, but that doesn't say much about other levels of the stack, like applications. And besides, we've had lots of succesful proprietary but…
The logic is this: you are taking a picture while I see the whole movie. So, Apple is winning 'now', so is Whatsapp, but they may lose it eventuallly b/c they are closed models.
Besides, how "I'm talking a picture while you see the whole movie"?
The case of browsers I mentioned, for example, spans 2 decades+ that closed browsers dominate. Or take desktop operating systems: closed ones are winning for 5+ decades.
That's a whole lot of pictures. I don't think there's a historical based argument you made for how the movie ends, besides your faith in a particular outcome.
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Its the opposite - Whats App is storing nothing which limits what they can do.
That hardly makes it 'the opposite', unless you presume only the most limited interpretation of the words. The fact that whatsapp stores nothing has little to do with their cease and desist orders. 3rd party clients can still be built on a system that stores nothing.
It's interesting at this point to think about identity and authentication in WhatsApp. They've never had a username or password and their use of your mobile phone number as your identity seems to have been key to their success (the other factor I'd cite is good cross-platform support).
WhatsApp authn on mobile consists of a once-off SMS verification to confirm you are running WhatsApp on the mobile device hosting the SIM card corresponding to the phone number identity you've claimed for yourself. That said, I recently saw a case of someone using a temporary pre-paid SIM card while she was traveling here in South Africa yet her WhatsApp messages from that phone still appeared to come from her New Zealand number. Not sure how that passed the authn.
The lack of username and password, I believe, is what has led to some of the unnaturalness of the WhatsApp web app. I don't think that their remarks of "the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device -- this means all of your messages still live on your phone." reveal all of what guided their design choices. I also doubt that they "don't get the web". Instead I think they need the phone there and online because they have no username and password (or other device-independent authn) and they have thought quite carefully about protecting what got them ahead of the myriads of other perfectly functional IM apps out there in the first place.
I've been using XMPP on my phone just fine. Why do I need WhatsApp which is not open? It offers me nothing new other than having to verify my phone number. But I can just use Google Voice if I wanted to message someone who knows my phone number. If I'm talking with someone in India there is no reason why I shouldn't just use XMPP.
>> "Why do I need WhatsApp which is not open? It offers me nothing new other than having to verify my phone number." The common answer: because al my friends are using it. I don't understand why people don't use SMS when most smartphone contracts come with unlimited messages now. Why send your info through ANOTHER third party? But my friends are using it for the group feature so unless I don't want to be left out of…