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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

#351

Post by efreak »

nozzlegear wrote: post #290
xvedejas wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over d…

Being pseudonymous doesn't prevent you from using it to contact people you actually know offline. I used Steam to talk with my group members about a project in college a couple times. Other times I used Google chat/talk/whatever it was called at the time (embedded in the browser inbox). I had a flip phone at the time, so pretty much anything I could use on desktop was easier.

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

#352

Post by progval »

thisislife2 wrote: post #14
odo1242 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Receiving message requests from third-party users. So you have to get the person you know to flip a toggle before they get the message.

Is this a per-contact setting or a "universal" one?

It's universal, but you need to whitelist specific apps people can message you from. This is what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/0gKY76z.png

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

#353

Post by cheema33 »

TZubiri wrote: post #229
cheema33 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But iMessage is already open? How do you send/receive messages from a Windows system? My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only.

>How do you send/receive messages from a Windows system? You can send an SMS. >My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol, that you can only use on Apple devices. But from non Apple devices you can use the standard SMS.

>> My guess is that you think iMessage is SMS-only

> No, there's Apple's proprietary protocol...

Earlier you asked: "But iMessage is already open?"

Now you are saying that iMessage uses "Apple's proprietary protocol". I hope now you understand that when people say that Apple iMessage is not open, they are not talking about the SMS protocol that Apple does not own.

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

#354

Post by wtetzner »

jeroenhd wrote: post #259
ivm wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we're talking about mass adoption, not Hacker News users' preferences. Signal simply doesn't offer anything attractive to most people. As someone who spends a dozen hours on WhatsApp and Telegram each week, I don't see any real benefits either.

Signal offers a chat app that works fine and is not owned by Meta. That's enough for a significant amount of people to switch already. I'd love some quality of life updates to some of the niche features, like the desktop app, but the mobile app does everything it needs to do. Community chats aren't what keep people on WhatsApp, the network effect does.

For most people quality of life stuff will probably rank higher than "not owned by Meta". I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of WhatsApp users don't even know (or care) it's owned by Meta.

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

#355

Post by tngranados »

j1elo wrote: post #349

I'd like to take the opportunity to mention a tiny very useful app that allows opening a WhatsApp chat directly with any number, without having to register it first as a contact. Great for vacations or similar situations where a quick one-time chat is needed with somebody: * https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trianguloy... * Webapp: https://trianguloy.github.io/OpenInWhatsapp_Web/ I'm just grateful for…

Since some time ago, you can type the number directly in the search bar and it would let you message it, at least on iOS

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

#357

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #319
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, their statement was ‘if another country gets it, I should get it too’. That’s not the same as ‘I long for the privacy benefits offered to Europeans and actively write to my government representatives to request it’. It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so. At let’s not forget, most of the egregiou…

"X should do Y" is common phrasing Americans use to talk about US public policy. >It’s more like expecting a privilege your parents gave your sibling just because they got it as a result of doing well in school while your grades were so-so. It was once believed that privacy is a right that all humans share, and should be advanced for everyone. Modern scholars understand that this view is mistaken. Privacy is a privil…

America has eroded and treated privacy not as a right, not as a privilege, but as nothing. It has been doing this more and more blatantly across the world for the past 2 years and has now become an authoritarian state, threatening war across the globe while simultaneously destabilising the global economy. America IS bad, for multiple reasons.

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

#358

Post by catoc »

fooker wrote: post #318
neves wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work. It's not a technical problem. It's a political one

> It's not a technical problem How do you do encryption?

Serving 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least

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

#359

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

B1FIDO wrote: post #348
thedonncha wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Ireland on my otherwise very generous mobile phone account I'm charged for multimedia SMS texts. They're not included in my SMS bundle.

Multimedia "texts" are actually MMS. In fact, if you send more than 160 characters, those are also MMS because it's an extension of the SMS standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically do…

Aren’t SMS that are over 160 characters being concatenated? There used to be a standard for that.
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