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 is, if it can't figure out how to be open and make money: it will succumb.
WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
41–50 of 132 posts
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#42[deleted]
IndexedDB is an accepted web standard and can store images and files. If you try to store too much information the browser asks the users permission to do so. There is no need to use the local filesystem API because thats not a standard.
As for not storing things, that still doesn't require the phone to be logged onto the network. The web client could just be another "device". If you're logged with the web client then the data is pushed to your browser. If you're logged with your phone then the data is pushed to your phone. This hack of making the phone talk to the web client to circumvent the limitation of only a single device per user on the whatsapp network is just silly. Telegram for example allows you to log with many devices and you can remotely disconnect other devices if you want.
We have full IRC clients such as irccloud.com, we have full email web clients such as gmail.com, we have XMPP web clients. The web platform can handle instant messaging. We have desktop notifications as a web api. We have IndexedDB as storage medium. We have websockets as communication layer. There is absolutely no need for the hacks they did.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#43Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#44Wasn't Whatsapp's success attributed to their policy of inclusion (all major mobile platform/devices). This seems like coming from a different company altogether.
Not at all. First of, these modern messaging/social/mobile-first messaging apps we see getting popular have a fundamentally different model than what most of us desktop-first are used to. They are not centred around an account, but around a device. If you delete your Line app, all messages are gone. Hell, even if you log into Line from a new device, messages on the old one will be deleted. A friend of mine recently l…
I don't see how this explains the poor functionality of the web client?
All a web client needs is persistent, large storage - which is provided by IndexedDB - and to access the network to reach the service's servers.
WhatsApp should be able to make a fully-functional web client.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#45If 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.
The same reason Apple has consistently waged war against clones?
Yes. But don't be too specific about those reasons, though, or you will be downvoted.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#46Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).
> It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose.
* XMPP as a standard and as community implementation missed to jump to mobile. Because it's open, it can eventually get there, but it makes me sad and angry how Jingle (Google's Voice & Video extension) was poorly adopted by clients for years. And now we have Hangouts...
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#47So? Why should WhatsApp "understand" the web?
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#48I 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?
Ok! All of this is my gut-feel with no data behind it. Caveat emptor. Here goes nothing Yippeekayay
The single device strategy is to keep the whatsapp network a network of people - no bots and no spam.
They are still trying to destroy Kik, Line and Viber. The war is not over (http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/how-many-people-use-c...) Bots and spam would be just the reason for people to switch. As it is, spam might be the only thing that can kills Tinder - and people are watching that.
Line and Viber are more fun and more full featured than whatsapp. The only thing keeping people on whatsapp is that people are annoyed by having too many messaging apps on their phone. If people get sick of whatsapp they will nag their friends to install Line. Once those friends are nagged a few times they will install it. How about when they hear that the voice calls higher quality (subjective of course)?
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#49Of course not. It's not federated and not standard compliant. It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet's dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).
> It's a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Yes, as a (former* ) XMPP advocate, this makes me sad. But it's really WhatsApp's attitude towards 3rd party clients that have me blacklisting them for myself as well as family and friends. This is the antithesis of what XMPP was supposed to bring. It's like nega-XMPP. * XMPP as a standard and as community implementation m…
Yes, poor Jingle support really puzzles me. It's not new, but I barely ever manage to connect two different clients without problems for video calls. That's besides the fact that most clients don't support it at all yet...
I don't have much respect for Hangouts really. If Google wanted to improve things they could propose Hangouts protocol as a replacement for XMPP. Make it an open IETF standard. They were such backers of XMPP in the past. And what did they do instead? Another walled garden and proprietary protocol. Total failure Google. That was the point when I said - you are lying about not being evil.
Re: WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
#50> 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 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.