BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

https://www.birdy.chat/blog/first-to-interoperate-with-whatsapp

by joooscha • 6 months ago

725 488 6 months ago

With the new WhatsApp interface mandated by the DMA, any BirdyChat user in the EEA will be able to start a chat with any WhatsApp user in the region simply by knowing their phone number.

Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.

dfajgljsldkjag2• 6 months ago

It's better than nothing. If you have a different app and want to talk to your friend who uses whatsapp it's much easier to convince him to toggle a setting than to download a different app.

thisislife23• 6 months ago

Could you clarify - What has been implemented as opt-in by WhatsApp to act as a hurdle?

odo12425• 6 months ago

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.

InsideOutSanta• 6 months ago

Yep, 100% malicious compliance on Meta's part. I hope they get punished for this.

mlrtime6• 6 months ago

How so exactly? They can say they are keeping conversations secure from 3rd parties.

Fire-Dragon-DoL2• 6 months ago

How the opt-in is considered acceptable, that's a toothless resolution

tonyhart72• 6 months ago

because its EU only ????? you want it to be enabled by default while only certain amount of people want to use it

dmitrygr7• 6 months ago

I understand my agreement with WhatsApp - i read it and all. I have no agreement with that other app. I do not know what they would do with my data. Until they give me a privacy policy and i approve it, they indeed should have none of my data. Opt-in is the correct solution.

I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant (that app is European and thus must care about GDPR). They do not have my permission to have/handle my private data, and GDPR does not allow WhatAspp to hand it over without my permission either... My name (which whatsapp exposes simply with my phone number) is considered PII under GDPR and

lxgr8• 6 months ago

What a strange way to think about a telecommunications service. By the same logic, shouldn’t there be a privacy policy for regular old phone lines? Who knows which third parties are between you and the person on the other end!

And speaking about the other end: I have bad news about all the data you share with untrustworthy contacts on WhatsApp…

Quite practically, anyone that enables backups (which WhatsApp heavily nudges people to do) uploads a copy of all your messages and media sent to them to a cloud provider you have no privacy agreement with.

prmoustache4• 6 months ago

any WhatsApp user in the region

The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.

joe_mamba2• 6 months ago

The regional limit makes it pretty much useless.

Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.

hei-lima4• 6 months ago

In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common.

I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.

The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.

bambax• 6 months ago

pretty much useless

To you maybe. Not everyone has overseas contacts.

krzyk2• 6 months ago

It is an unique feature.

Most people communicate with the ones in their region. Even when going on vacation most people can afford only to travel around their own continent.

zjaffee• 6 months ago

I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.

yapyap• 6 months ago

The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.

… useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.

krick• 6 months ago

I'm not sure what they mean by "in the region", but my case is even more extreme, as pretty much the only time I'm forced to use whatsapp is when I'm travelling and need to communicate with all sorts of hosts who annoyingly expect me to have whatsapp. After returning home I always delete it.

So I am usually "in the region" with those guys, but since "region" probably means "similar phone number" it will be useless to me too.

zoobab• 6 months ago

"opt-in"

FAIL

raverbashing• 6 months ago

as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side

Chatting with anyone has always been opt in from the point of the receiver, so I don't get your point?

urbandw311er• 6 months ago

any BirdyChat user

And how many of these are there? Anyone?

moffkalast• 6 months ago

I thought the stupid name was enough to kill it tbh. I'm not telling anyone they can call me on "birdychat" lmao.

lpcvoid• 6 months ago

While I also don't think Birdychat is a good name, you could also argue that "Whatsapp" is a weird name for an app billions of people use.

wohoef• 6 months ago

Just opened my Whatsapp settings and "Third-party chat requests" is on by default (From the Netherlands). Although to actually receive messages you do have to activate this feature.

1a527dd5• 6 months ago

I wonder if this will force Apple to open up iMessage.

zer0zzz2• 6 months ago

Last I heard iMessage was not deemed an eu “gatekeeper” so no

serial_dev• 6 months ago

I don’t know anyone in Europe who uses iMessage, everyone is on WhatsApp though.

thisislife23• 6 months ago

Exciting news! Can't wait for iMessage to open up too. Any idea if this (or other future messengers) will work outside of Europe too or does WhatsApp use some kind of geofencing, like Apple, to prevent non-EU citizens from enjoying the same rights too?

thevillagechief2• 6 months ago

iMessage will not be opening up. They lobbied hard in the EU and got an exemption for not being popular enough there I guess.

nozzlegear8• 6 months ago

Did they lobby for an exemption, or is that just how the law is written?

Hamuko• 6 months ago

iMessage really isn't popular in Europe. Although the fact that any SMS sent between two iPhones automatically converts into an iMessage message means that there are definitely (accidental) users.

TZubiri5• 6 months ago

But iMessage is already open? You can send an SMS to any number and it shows in iMessage, completely interoperable through that standard protocol.

Whatsapp on the other hand does not show SMS messages (Which is a design choice that makes sense from a security perspective I guess, not saying it's wrong.)

kelnos5• 6 months ago

You're confusing two different things, though I don't blame you for it, as it is confusing. "iMessage" is the OTT E2E-encrypted chat protocol. "Messages" note the lack of the leading "i" and trailing "s") is an iOS app that lets you send and receive messages using both the iMessage and SMS/MMS/RCS protocols.

iMessage is not open, and Apple fights efforts by other companies (e.g. Beeper) to interoperate with it.

nottorp5• 6 months ago

You can send an SMS to any number

Can you send a photo?

cheema332• 6 months ago

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.

B1FIDO6• 6 months ago

I must protest that this kind of announcement belies the stupidity of proprietary chat protocols.

Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols.

When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.

But of course, AIM purported to use Oscar at the time, but they really hated F/OSS and 3rd-party clients, and so did the other proprietary guys, so it became cat-and-mouse to keep the client compatible while the servers always tried to break their functionality.

Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.

I am not impressed. I am McKayla Maroney unimpressed.

I want open protocols and I want client devs who are free to produce clients in freeform, as long as they can follow the protocol specs. Now we have email clients who speak SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, including the "secured, encrypted" versions of those protocols. We should ask for nothing less when it comes to other communications.

PEe9bB7D• 6 months ago

Matrix is getting traction though...

Nextgrid5• 6 months ago

Matrix is a lost cause. The protocol is too complex/ambitious and the company behind it doesn't have the resources to actually produce a good server nor client implementation. I was hopeful for it at first but at some point you have to be realistic.

kelnos5• 6 months ago

Is it? My experience with it has been middling at best, and I communicate with exactly zero people through Matrix outside of the context of open source projects.

The UX is still pretty bad, with many rough edges around sign-in and device verification. The message/encryption story has gotten better (it's been a long time since I've gotten spurious errors about being unable to decrypt messages), but it's still not particularly easy to use. Performance-wise I've found it to still be fairly bad; loading messages after I've been offline takes a noticeable amount of pause, something I rarely see with other messaging platforms.

On the plus side, Matrix does have many chat features that many people like (or even require) in a chat platform, like formatting, emojis, message reactions, threads, etc.

otterley2• 6 months ago

We had XMPP, and even Google Chat used that in the early days.

It's not like users haven't had choice over the decades to choose software that runs on open standards. It's that the features and UX provided by closed software has been more compelling to them. Open standards and interoperability generally aren't features most people value when it comes to chat. They care mostly about what their friends and family are using.

Nextgrid5• 6 months ago

The issue isn't closed vs open but business models. The reason most services don't support third-party clients is that their business model is based on advertising (aka wasting the user's time) and a third-party client would reduce said wasted time.

A proprietary/for-profit messenger can very well use open protocols and embrace third-party clients if their business model wasn't explicitly based on anti-productivity.

petre• 6 months ago

Google Chat used XMPP to build an user base and then cut it off from the Jabber network. That's when I stopped using it. Or was it when it got integrated into Gmail? Then they rebranded it and binned each iteration several times.

john612• 6 months ago

WhatsApp uses the open Signal Protocol.

pipo2342• 6 months ago

Pedantic: I think you meant to say open whisper protocol, the end to end protocol which is Whatsapp copied from Signal.

sedatk• 6 months ago

That's a bit misleading. WhatsApp uses Signal's end-to-end encryption scheme, but not Signal's networking protocol. It's still proprietary. Otherwise, we could have cross-messaging between Signal and Whatsapp.

arter456• 6 months ago

Social networks and chat apps are mostly dominated by the network effect.

Since the purpose of these apps is literally putting you in contact with other people, you tend to use the same app/social network most of your friends and family are using.

This is not necessarily true for platforms you use to find new people, but even then, you're going to use the websites/apps people with your interests are using.

pipo2342• 6 months ago

I don't think his rant is against social networks or instant messaging perse, but about vendor lock in.

The way I read it is along the lines of Mike Masnick's protocols not platforms.

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

buildfocus• 6 months ago

Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.

Resd the article - this isn't a proprietary secret API, it's the official intended interop API the EU now obliges them to provide. Not exactly 100% what you're asking for (I too would prefer common standards) but forcing interop access is a very good start.

kelnos5• 6 months ago

I must protest that this kind of announcement belies the stupidity of proprietary chat protocols. [...] In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.

ICQ was also a proprietary chat protocol. The Pidgin (then "Gaim") developers had to reverse-engineer it. Fortunately the folks at ICQ were less hostile toward third-party clients than AOL was toward Gaim's reverse-engineer of AIM's protocol, as you note. (Not to mention sending legal threats to the Gaim/Pidgin team to get them to change the name of the app.)

IRC was indeed king, when the internet was populated mostly by technically-savvy folks who could deal with its rough edges. (For example, you probably forget how annoying it was to get file transfer working over IRC; sometimes it was just impossible to do, depending on clients and NAT conditions and so forth. Things like ChanServ and NickServ were creative, but inelegant, hacks, functions that the protocol should handle directly.) And consider that IRC has more or less not changed at all in decades. I am a technically-savvy user, and I gave up on IRC, switching to Matrix for those types of chats, which has its own rough edges, but at least has modern features to sorta kinda make up for it. (Otherwise I generally use Signal, or, if I can't get people to switch, Whatsapp.) I want to be able to do simple formatting, react to messages, edit messages, etc. And most people in the world seem to want those things too. IRC has stagnated and doesn't meet most people's needs.

But I absolutely agree in that I want open protocols too. It's just hard to fight against big corporations with endless development, design, and marketing budgets. And those big corporations are not incentivized to build or support open protocols; in fact they are incentivized to do the opposite. As much as the EU does get some things wrong, I think we need strong governments to force companies to open up their protocols and systems for interoperability, and to stamp down hard on them when they comply maliciously, as Apple and Meta does. The EU is pretty much the only entity that comes close to doing that. I really wish the US was more forward-thinking, but our government is full of oligarchs and oligarch-wannabes these days, thanks to the lack of any meaningful campaign finance limits. At least California (where I live) has some GDPR-inspired privacy legislation, but I think something like the EU's DMA is still too "out there" for us here, unfortunately.

B1FIDO6• 6 months ago

ICQ was not only proprietary, but it was centralized and server-based, even though the messaging part was peer-to-peer.

Even in those heady early days of the mid-90s, it was recognized that many end-users were behind NAT and firewalls and otherwise-inaccessible endpoints of the Internet. Many of us were also on dialup lines that were intermittently connected, so they needed to establish some sort of persistent presence.

So the ICQ client was designed to check-in with a central server to indicate the online/away/DND/offline status of the client. I do not know how much of ICQ's messaging went through that server, but I believe that a lot of clients in those days were designed to, eventually, connect peer-to-peer for delivering files and stuff. Mainly, because the operators of servers didn't want to be overwhelmed with transferring lots of data!

Interestingly, ICQ and Livejournal as well were completely invaded and taken over by Russians. Or perhaps it was not an invasion, but a planned psy-op all along. My original UIN was 279866, and my girlfriend's was slightly below that: she had signed up first and got me on-board.

But eventually, Russians broke into my account, changed the profile, and commandeered it for their own purposes. And Livejournal got sold to Russian interests too.

I believe it was them watching us over here all along. It must have been a personal-data goldmine to know when teens and young adults were online and who they were connected to, on the social graph, whether it was IM'ing or blogging the old-fashioned way on Livejournal.

So beware with your modern "disruptive" apps, particularly ones like those fun e-Scooters you can share and rent. They are probably psy-ops from foreign-based actors who enjoy watching and recording our movements.

altern814• 6 months ago

This is pretty amazing, but I wish they picked a better name for it. I have a feeling that a good amount of people will dismiss it just because of the name.

snowmobile8• 6 months ago

What's wrong with the name? Some cultural reference I'm not getting?

Onavo• 6 months ago

Twitter. Also it could mean penis (in some places).

altern814• 6 months ago

It just sounds—let's say—too playful.

Specially if you go to the homepage and they're trying to market it as a work too.. If I went to my boss and tried to make the case that we should move all of our encrypted communication from Whatsapp to something called BirdyChat they would laugh at me and dismiss the idea.

That might just be me, not sure.

drcongo3• 6 months ago

I couldn't work out what the hell the app is from the website, as the home page tells you it's a "New Home for Work Chat" and mentions "Still using personal chat apps for work conversations?" - so I'm guessing it's supposed to have some business focus, but the app name makes it sound like something you'd install for your kids. I can't imagine ever saying to someone "we need to discuss contract details, let's talk on BirdyChat".

wiether• 6 months ago

Personally I hate the name because it reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdy_Nam_Nam (whose work I like)

TZubiri5• 6 months ago

It can always be rebranded later on

kelnos5• 6 months ago

What's wrong with the name? "WhatsApp" sounds pretty dumb to me, too, but it's entrenched in the social consciousness, so we don't really think about it.

(The name even has nothing to do with chat; originally WhatsApp was a way to share your "current status"; "WhatsApp" sounds like "what's up?".)

altern814• 6 months ago

I don't think Whatsapp sounds dumb. It's "what's up", and it came out when mobile apps were getting popular with everyone. I immediately got it when I heard it the first time, and it sounded good to me.

"BirdyChat" just sounds childish.

Maybe I'm in the minority, who knows, but project names are important. I've seen so many posts of people dismissing projects just because of the name...

LexiMax3• 6 months ago

Complaining about names seems like a surefire way to induce endless bikeshedding conversations that go nowhere. It's also often cited as a too-convenient excuse for why a service fails that doesn't really account for the market realities or whatever systemic failures were at play.

The truth is that 15 years ago, "tweet" was seen as a joke by those who weren't extremely online. It didn't stop Twitter from becoming a desirable place to socialize, at least for a time. If the internet made "tweet" happen, people can get used to any weird nomenclature.

GoatInGrey• 6 months ago

Birdy evokes the same energy as "BabySeal". I imagine you can understand why an app called "BabySealChat" would be off-putting to a thirty-something disgruntled developer?

dennis_jeeves2• 6 months ago

Better name "Birdie Num Num" . Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajMqhpCBPAY

odo12425• 6 months ago

How does this work with end to end encryption? Just out of curiosity

snowmobile8• 6 months ago

Sorry to be "that guy", because I don't know the details of how WhatsApp does E2EE, but in any proper (as in secure and private) implementation the only thing that should matter is whether the client follows the spec? You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?

skippyboxedhero3• 6 months ago

I think the suspicion is based on this app being offered in a region whose government is hostile to privacy and this implementation being connected with the strong nativist bent in Europe.

The "spec" is not relevant in any way because we have no idea what else is going on. Why was it relevant that these operators must specifically be in the EU? Everyone is just complying with the global spec...but the app provider must be in Europe...okay.

Trufa• 6 months ago

That's not what OP is asking, he's asking how do you have two separate e2e encrypted apps that can interact.

TZubiri5• 6 months ago

I can confirm that you don't know.

I can count 3 mistakes here:

1- The client isn't the only thing that matters (There's servers)

2- The client doesn't follow a spec in WhatsApp, there is no spec as it's a private non-interoperable system.

3- Browsers and HTTPS work with an entirely different encryption model, TLS is asymmetric, certificate based and domain based. TLS may be used in Whatsapp to some extent, but it's not the main encryption tool.

palata12• 6 months ago

The only thing that matter is whether you trust the app or not.

- If it is proprietary, you just have to blindly trust it (as is the case with WhatsApp currently: they say it is end-to-end encrypted, but you can't verify).

- If it is open source, then some people will want to understand how it works before they trust it. Other will either blindly trust (like for proprietary software) or trust that persons they trust understood how it works and were convinced.

You might as well ask, how does $browser work with HTTPS?

Well, exactly. I am interested in how the WhatsApp interop works just as I am interested in how HTTPS works.

odo12425• 6 months ago

Well, yes. But one could think of a world in which WhatsApp has its own internal protocol and to bolt on third-party support they just decide to represent third party clients as “virtual clients” on the server side, which would be the easiest way to make it work while not having E2EE support. Especially since the feature only exists for legal compliance purposes.

(This is not the case, apparently.)

palata12• 6 months ago

They explained it to some extent here: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...

mytailorisrich• 6 months ago

This is app/company from Latvia, as I understand.

brabel• 6 months ago

Don't they have a desktop app? The WhatsApp desktop app is heavy and annoying. Would love to use something else.

oblio7• 6 months ago

Just use the web version.

tcfhgj2• 6 months ago

The desktop version is the web version now

poisonborz3• 6 months ago

Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.

Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.

input_sh3• 6 months ago

Correct! This is just Meta doing malicious compliance by being "compatible" with companies with no actual product, three-months old waitlist, no actual users within the EU, and nobody to push back on WhatsApp's definition of interoperability. Then when some real product tries to actually become interoperable down-the-line, Meta's gonna be like "well these two did it just fine according to this backwards implementation, why can't you?"

They're both b2b products that are gonna try to find their first users by pitching the idea that you can use their products to spam WhatsApp users.

Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. Here, let me save you a click: https://haiket.com/press/release-nov11.html

Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.

kubb2• 6 months ago

I see a second round of legislation might be needed. They'll get it right eventually.

lurk22• 6 months ago

Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. […] Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.

How does this imply he has any connection to Meta? Companies license patents all the time.

blell3• 6 months ago

Any company can ask for interoperatibility with whatsapp. None of them are, because it's obviously against their interests.

The DMA will change nothing in this regard because the "many apps" approach is the most beneficial to users.

londons_explore2• 6 months ago

because it's obviously against their interests.

Why? I'd love to be an alternative whatsapp client with all kinds of new features that the official client doesn't have. Obviously you say you're building a compatible chat network, but the reality is users are just using your client to talk to whatsapp users.

Eg. one feature I'd love is some AI to automatically take any date and time someone mentions to me and put it as a draft event in my calendar. I miss so many events from big group chats I'm not paying proper attention to and suddenly everyone is saying "Whoa, you didn't come to Johns 50th birthday?!? Why not? We invited you months ago[in a group chat with 100 messages a day of mostly memes]"

poisonborz3• 6 months ago

obviously against their interests

Would love to know how it is "obviously" against my interest to make a chat app and have 3.3 billion users adressable instantly. Bad for internet health to be still tied to Meta, sure, but the damage was done and this is a way to reverse it.

nottorp5• 6 months ago

Well they lost me at waitlist.

m00dy• 6 months ago

I can vibecode this in an hour.

jakkos• 6 months ago

My new favorite breed of commenters are AI bros who go around lamenting how trivial other peoples' work is, while they themselves fail to create anything that anyone else actually wants to use

nottorp5• 6 months ago

Based on other comments it is bad enough to be vibe coded :)

hsbauauvhabzb6• 6 months ago

You could have vibecoded a better comment too. But you didn’t.

rambambram2• 6 months ago

As a European, I would like to know in _which_ European country you're based. I think I know all of them, people from abroad might not. Saying "Made in Europe" is too general for my European liking. ;)

arter456• 6 months ago

https://www.birdy.chat/terms says Latvia

kykat• 6 months ago

The company of the website appears to be based in Riga, Latvia https://company.lursoft.lv/en/fyello-productivity/4020345542...

altern814• 6 months ago

I thought the same thing.

I also don't think there's such a thing as "made in Europe", as if it was "made in USA". Is it made in Germany, Italy, Albania..?

ncruces• 6 months ago

Plenty of supermarket products say made in Europe, particularly (but not only) white label products.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 months ago

Surely it's very similar, companies can't - AFAIK - be registered in USA, they're registered in a state. USA's States have different tax and legislative climates, just like EU states do.

retired• 6 months ago

Could even be Turkey west of the Bosphorus.

They can fabricate the product in Bursa and do final assembly in West-Istanbul.

chatmasta• 6 months ago

I'd also like to know what "based in the EEA" means:

For interoperability to work, both you and your WhatsApp contacts need to be based in the EEA.

Does my contact phone number need to have an EEA country code? Does my current IP address need to be geolocated in the EEA? Do I need to download the two apps from a regional App Store in the EEA? Do I need to show an EEA payment method to both apps? What happens to my chats if I move or switch app stores?

ExoticPearTree8• 6 months ago

EEA = European Economic Area. It includes a few other countries such as Switzerland, Norway and about two more which I forgot.

timeon• 6 months ago

Reminds me eurosky.social they have on page:

"For Europe, this is our chance to build competitive alternatives to Big Tech. But we need European-hosted infrastructure to make that possibility a reality."

Page is hosted in USA.

direwolf2010• 6 months ago

I won't understand why people do that when Hetzner is so effective.

usr11062• 6 months ago

I agree, made in Europe, does not give enogh information. Their T&C gives the details: They are from Latvia.

I dare to claim: A majority of EU citizens know really nothing about Latvia.

redleader55• 6 months ago

As an European, you shouldn't discriminate based on country of origin within Europe.

rambambram2• 6 months ago

You're using the word "discriminate" in bad faith, don't do that. Not every made distinction is discrimination.

t00• 6 months ago

Closed, iOS only, invite only. Thanks.

Hackbraten• 6 months ago

Thanks for the heads up. You saved me some frustration and disappointment.

morphle• 6 months ago

Warning! Badly broken user interface, I wouldn't trust these programmers to get the end-to-end encryption right.

On the second screen of the app there is already an infuriating bug: they ask to give your work email because than you go hire in priority on their invite-only waiting list. So you type in your email again and again and again, alternating between all your emails, but you keep returning to the form asking for your work email. You check those emails to see if they send you something to activate your account but nothing. Exasperated you try the only other button, sign up with private email instead. Guess that works, because you leave the infinite loop. But than zilch, nada, nothing.

Don't these script-kiddies use their own app?

aduwah• 6 months ago

I was a big fan of pidgin, but this premise makes me feel iffy.

Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own. Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day.

Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion

maqp9• 6 months ago

The unfortunate problem with Pidgin is you don't have proper cross-platform E2EE chats, especially for groups. OTR is terribly outdated with its 1536-bit FFDH. These days the security margin sits at 2048-bit minimum, 3072-bit recommended. OMEMO might work but it's just not a standard. Good thing Signal made the whole thing just work.

Bender2• 6 months ago

Surely there must be someone capable of and willing to update OTR to support the latest PQC encryption protocols and ciphers. OTR is the only semi-trustable model of E2EE I have ever seen. Anything managed by the same platform managing the communication is dead in the water for me.

altern814• 6 months ago

I loved Pigdin! The UI and brand was so good, too, for Linux back in the day...

scroy2• 6 months ago

Just as good on Windows, honestly. I miss that little bird.

swiftcoder3• 6 months ago

this premise makes me feel iffy. Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging?

I think the pitch here is exactly the opposite of that? Many businesses in the EU already use WhatsApp for customer contact - this lets you separate your business communications from the app you use for personal messaging

thwg• 6 months ago

When a smaller network tries to be interoperable with a larger network, the larger network almost always eats up the smaller one. This is how XMPP was killed by Gtalk, if any of you are old enough to remember.

oblio7• 6 months ago

Gtalk did not kill XMPP. Very few people were using XMPP before Gtalk, most people were using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and other proprietary protocols. Gtalk supported XMPP to gain traction as a more open messenger and possibly because they implemented the original version on top of XMPP to get it out the door faster.

Gtalk did pull the plug on XMPP but that didn't really change much.

I don't remember EVER interacting with someone with their own XMPP server. Gtalk had nothing to kill.

B1FIDO6• 6 months ago

Jabber was big with the "federated, decentralized" crowd. I recall several colleagues who established Jabber addresses and advertised them, sometimes as their only IM address.

XMPP was more than Gtalk, but I think that Gtalk was the "death knell" for XMPP, having absorbed it and sort of claimed it as their own. Anyone who would've used federated Jabber addresses in those days is using Mastodon now.

vpShane2• 6 months ago

This means nothing good, Meta and its products are a privacy nightmare, with WhatsApp having major market share outside of the U.S.

People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available.

No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.

fragmede• 6 months ago

and people using it. That may not matter much to you, but that's usually what people what from their chat app.

Nextgrid5• 6 months ago

Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format? I think now they have some bullshit proprietary paid cloud storage solution (why not let me use the cloud I already pay for?), but for years they haven't had any solution for iOS at all.

Last time I had to reinstall my phone I ended up having to use & fix some Github project that simulated Signal's transfer protocol to simulate a target device to export my data.

I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.

B-Con• 6 months ago

Any time an app has bizarre functionality gap on iOS, I assume it's because of Apple's anti-consumer bullshit app restrictions.

No idea if that's actually what's going on, but Apple thinks of their devices as appliances and hates when apps offer pro-customer features.

jolmg• 6 months ago

Signal still doesn't allow you to backup/export chat history on iOS into an open format?
I then deleted Signal and migrated to iMessage/WhatsApp and called it a day.

That doesn't fix anything, does it?

Last time I tried to export a years-long WhatsApp chat, I was only able to export a few-weeks-worth, IIRC. WhatsApp chat exports also don't include media. It's just a txt file. The backup is limited to using Google and it's done in such a way that you're not allowed to download it yourself.

The only way to export the chat was to use the web client and scroll all the way to the top, then copy-paste the HTML out of web-inspector once everything loaded. I don't think that's possible anymore. IIRC, the web client now tops at some point with a message like "use the Android app to look further back".

digiown• 6 months ago

Signal doesn't allow you to do that on any platform. The only way I know of to get the data out is via some random github project to extract operate on the encrypted backup from android: https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools

p1anecrazy• 6 months ago

Just use Telegram, at least it’s not U.S. made

maqp9• 6 months ago

* Not end-to-end encrypted by default.

* No end-to-end encryption for groups.

* No end-to-end encryption for desktop meaning normal use when working on computer requires you and your friends to constantly whip out phone to send 1:1 secret chats. Nobody wants to do that so they revert to non-E2EE chats.

* Terrible track record with end-to-end encryption deployment from AES-IGE to IND-CCA vulnerabilities

* CEO pretends to be exiled from Russia but in secretly visits Russia over SIXTY times in 10 years https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/

* Zero metadata protection from server

* Open source, but it's meaningless as it only confirms the client doesn't protect content or metadata from the server.

palata12• 6 months ago

I think Signal is a better alternative, even though it's US made. It's open source.

ivm5• 6 months ago

Signal's UX is years behind even modern WhatsApp, let alone Telegram, which is closer to a blogging or social platform. We can't expect mass adoption of such a clunky app simply because it's more private – it has never worked that way.

palata12• 6 months ago

Maybe I'm old, but there is nothing I use in WhatsApp that does not exist in Signal. What are you missing there?

UserMark• 6 months ago

I've been beta testing https://www.joinmorse.com lately it's in very early stages, but it's promising (if you don't care about the "social" features).

nottorp5• 6 months ago

Doesn't this signal thing require a phone number?

ExpertAdvisor012• 6 months ago

Hope the new Whatsapp interface won't be abused for spam . As Whatsapp already has spam issues . Will it run through meta's anti-spam filtering ?

ExoticPearTree8• 6 months ago

As Whatsapp already has spam issues

Want to elaborate a little? I think I got only one spammy WhatsApp message in the last who knows how many years it was made available (I remember the time when I had to pay to use it on the iPhone). I get more SMS spam nowadays.

ExpertAdvisor012• 6 months ago

Newly registered Accounts from India/Pakistan were spamming me (pig butchering scam ) . Around 90% got picked up by the spam filter,but when they use hundreds/thousands accounts even 10% is a lot.

colinprince• 6 months ago

This five-month-old comment suggests that birdychat uses telegram, pivot maybe?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736050

nunobrito• 6 months ago

Or likely combinining both. Good catch.

my_throwaway233• 6 months ago

While not a commercial offering, which is what this is saying in reality - closed source, commercial alternative with (limited) interoperability, I've been running my own chat server for a while now with (limited) interoperability with both Whatsapp and Messenger.

I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice, and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don't exist yet AFAIK, and they're truly game-changers. Will that change? Does the DMA mention anything other than chat? Perhaps someone could enlighten me.

thebiblelover7• 6 months ago

How have you been running it? How did you make it interoperable?

my_throwaway233• 6 months ago

I'm using Element Synapse with the Mautrix bridges. They're all a pain to setup, with a ton of required configuration options each, but once setup, it's mostly transparent where any one chat originates. Reactions, emojis, media, it all just works.

The downside, of course, is that voice and video will not work.

Oh, and perhaps a ton of initial invitations, one for every conversation you have open.

There are open servers you can join, with the bridges enabled, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose. At that point you might as well use a commercial, closed-source offering, as, ironically, a corporation with a large footprint you can sue. Average Joe with an AWS instance you might not be able to track down, should your data leak.

https://github.com/element-hq/synapse

https://github.com/mautrix/meta

DanOpcode• 6 months ago

Would be interesting to hear how it works what you have built.

Edit: Saw your other comment now.

my_throwaway233• 6 months ago

Frankly I didn't "build" anything. It was mostly just a case of setting up the docker scripts, make sure the volumes have proper permissions and the configuration is sane. The configuration though, I'll take all the credit in the world for wading through, haha. These are not software with opinions included.

wolvoleo8• 6 months ago

Yes but element/matrix aren't going to work with WhatsApp on offering compatibility. They have reasons for that, most of them good ones but I doubt that video is coming.

AgharaShyam• 6 months ago

This is really amazing. I hope some regulation like DMA comes to India as well.

Does WhatsApp charge money for this? If not, why would a business use their API? They could simply create an app to directly talk to their customers, or am I missing something?

yigalirani• 6 months ago

Would that work outside europe?

bni• 6 months ago

Does this mandate allow me to use a. 3rd party Teams, Google Chat and Slack client?

I suspect the answer is no, but why?

benoau• 6 months ago

They are not designated gatekeepers. It is unfortunate because interoperability should be its own objective for its own sake.

aniviacat• 6 months ago

Because they're not big enough to be considered a "gatekeeper".

usr11062• 6 months ago

There are criteria for how dominant a platform is to be considered gatekeeper. Teams, Google and Slack have much smaller market share for private messaging, so I guess they are not affected. Don't remember the criteria by heart.

shevy-java• 6 months ago

That name isn't that great ...

WhatsApp is not a great name either, but catchy and somewhat simple.

BirdyPo.. I mean BirdyChat sounds like when doves cry. But not as catchy.

Also, I am all in favour of Europeans becoming less dependent on the USA (yet-another-ICE-killing incident today, with video footage contradicting the claims made by the current government - again), but there is kind of ... a weak decision-making process here. Lobbyists sell to Europeans that Amazon data servers in Europe, now comply with european laws. Well, those are still external companies that will hand over data from europeans, so that is not a solution. Why do some media try to insinuate otherwise? Who owns and controls all these media?

u80802• 6 months ago

still external companies that will hand over data from europeans

The idea here is that EU three letter agencies also have access to your data

aucisson_masque• 6 months ago

I’d rather have my data accessed by eu agencies than USA ones. Seeing how this country is turning more and more into a fascist oligarchy.

amelius4• 6 months ago

Birdy has this Twittery sound to it.

lxgr8• 6 months ago

Who owns and controls all these media?

Never attribute to a cabal what can be adequately described by Gell-Mann-Amnesia.

ExoticPearTree8• 6 months ago

yet-another-ICE-killing incident today

Man with a gun approaches law enforcement during an operation. What do you think was going to happen? They would give him flowers?

How about you try the same thing with the police during a stop or a chase and see if the results are different.

This is really not the place for biased political discourse that has nothing to do with the topic of the conversation.

jordemort• 6 months ago

I'm pretty resentful that people in the US are stuck using worse/less featureful versions of products from US companies, while the government in Europe can get these kinds of concessions for their people. If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well, since we can't be bothered otherwise to pass any of these nice laws for ourselves. See also: choice in app stores

latexr• 6 months ago

Sometimes it happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

wswin• 6 months ago

Let's not pretend they would do this if the tech monopolies were european.

lxgr8• 6 months ago

Yes, the EU would never dare to regulate European companies, for example require banks to offer free and instant person-to-person money transfers or mobile phone operators to offer data roaming at domestic rates.

cromka• 6 months ago

Let's not pretend you ever bothered to check if that's actually true

hsbauauvhabzb6• 6 months ago

That’s because your government aligns itself with businesses, not consumers.

If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well

This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have. You chose your government, not the rest of the world.

mlrtime6• 6 months ago

And you don't have to use any of it, feel free to stop tomorrow.

0xDEAFBEAD5• 6 months ago

If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well

The obvious implication of the above statement is that the US government should force the company to do this.

This is a pretty typical self -entitled attitude that Americans have.

When Americans ask their government for the exact same thing that Europeans asked their government for, suddenly Europeans think Americans are "entitled". There's no content to your ideology beyond just "America Bad".

qubex• 6 months ago

It can go both ways: for example in the EU Apple disallows mirroring of iPhones on Macs because of its interpretation of EU statutes, though it occurred at the same time as they were required to support third-party app stores, so I strongly suspect it was a bit of ‘FU’ to the EU.

But yeah broadly speaking I’m very content about the greater legal protections this continent affords. (And it only works because the EU makes rules for such a large and valuable market, why is why breaking away à la Brexit amounts to such a loss of leverage: you have to reach consensus, but you also become a behemoth. Useful tradeoff.)

direwolf2010• 6 months ago

And Apple does this while also ignoring the rule about third–party app stores — they are not supported.

altern814• 6 months ago

What is "the government in Europe"..?

fL0per• 6 months ago

The bodies in charge of the EU governance, probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutions_of_the_European_U...

Commision [executive], Council (of Ministers/of the EU) [legislative] and Parliament [legislative] are the three most significant in terms of doing/looking like what any sovereign country government would.

stasomatic• 6 months ago

Surely you are aware that WhatsApp is a product of a tiny US co. Meta? Funny how the world sans the US is so in love with it. Shouldn’t the EU be out on the streets boycotting it?

drnick12• 6 months ago

It would have been more effective to require Meta (and all other messaging companies) to implement an open protocol or open source theirs, so that people can freely write alternative clients free of malware.

didip• 6 months ago

The sky might as well rains toads before this happens.

reedciccio• 6 months ago

Doesn't Whatsapp already use an open source protocol? https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

drnick12• 6 months ago

AFAIK it's Signal with proprietary extensions, so it's effectively closed.

uyzstvqs2• 6 months ago

A custom API is the only way for a platform to extend its native E2EE sessions and features to other platforms. Making those APIs completely open would become a major spam problem, which would likely end them up in the same situation as SMTP, where small servers are blocked-by-default by big providers.

Interoperability by agreement between legitimate messaging services, using custom APIs is the only realistic and secure way to accomplish this.

direwolf2010• 6 months ago

But WhatsApp is already completely open for spammers. They can use the secret API or screen-scrape WhatsApp itself.

ExoticPearTree8• 6 months ago

No, this is BS. Why? You want users for your chat app? Go get them the old fashioned way, not by anti US companies legislation.

amelius4• 6 months ago

When can I send messages from a PC running Python?

vachina• 6 months ago

You can just that a working script is run by crooks (and is not public)

charcircuit2• 6 months ago

WhatsApp has an official API you can use already.

https://pypi.org/project/whatsapp-python/

GranPC• 6 months ago

That is not official, unmaintained since November 2024, and only applicable for the business API. It wouldn't allow someone to create a WhatsApp client for a non-Android/iOS platform.

amelius4• 6 months ago

Looks like it is an API for the WhatsApp Business Platform.

(So not free, not for consumers)

https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messa...

dmitrygr7• 6 months ago

Hopefully - never ever ever ever ever.

I do not want spam.

This is why iMessage is much better than SMS - there is an implicit cost to send. This is why there is 100x (my experience) iMessage spam than SMS spam. Easy to send messages -> spam

jeroenhd5• 6 months ago

better than SMS - there is an implicit cost to send

Funnily enough, people being charged per SMS but being allowed to send as much messages as they need on apps like WhatsApp is exactly why SMS/MMS is barely used on a large scale outside of North America.

I rarely receive any spam on my phone. WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal do have the occasional obvious bot, but all apps make it trivial to block and get rid of any of them.

circuit10• 6 months ago

It’s already possible to make WhatsApp bots, if the API was official they could moderate it better if anything so I don’t see how it would help with spam

direwolf2010• 6 months ago

All phone and internet services in the EU are connected to your personal identity document, similar to China. If you send spam, the police come to your house.

velocity32303• 6 months ago

In a roundabout way, you can.

Today, I could write a Python script to connect to my Matrix Synapse server and send a message to rooms bridged to WhatsApp via the `mautrix-whatsapp` bridge.

greentea23• 6 months ago

Despite the opt in limitation, I wonder if this interop capability will allow a bridge that doesn't require you to install whatsapp apk on a real device (unfortunately signal has the same problem). I fortunately kept an old android whose sole purpose is to keep these 2 apps installed. Not ideal, but works well.

Even better if we could ditch the phone number requirement. Many have said to me things like "I use whatsapp not SMS because I am not American", but of course everyone on WhatsApp uses SMS. To stay logged into WhatsApp you necessessarily must have an SMS enabled non-VOIP phone number that you are regularly paying a telecom provider for to receive auth codes.

sahiljagtapyc• 6 months ago

damnn

ksec• 6 months ago

I am wondering if this opens up the possibility of having more than two WhatsApp Number on the same phone. Especially on iOS.

I have long requested this feature for Whatsapp Business, where I can pay an annual subscription just to have more than one number. So I can separate life between Business and Friends.

augusto-moura• 6 months ago

I think you can do it on pure Androids that can have more than 1 SIM card, you need to have an Android profile for each and have both sim cards in the same phone.

direwolf2010• 6 months ago

Nexus used to support unlimited profiles for the whole phone including every app, Samsung phones don't.

wolvoleo8• 6 months ago

You can do this on many Android phones. You can have up to 5 WhatsApp numbers on a Samsung phone.

Samsung has dual messenger, so you can have 2 instances by default. Then you can open up a work profile and have another two. Then install WhatsApp in a secure folder and have another one (dual messenger seems blocked in secure folder so just one)

My_Name• 6 months ago

Let me know when I can link it to the hundred whatsapp groups other people have added me to, so I can remove the stain of zuckerberg from as much of my life as possible.

velocity32303• 6 months ago

Install a Matrix client and run a WhatsApp bridge and you can.

Is it trivial? No.

Is it possible? Yes, I do it.

zahirbmirza• 6 months ago

From their page

"Built for better conversations Reach people with their email, not their phone number. Designed for focused, meaningful exchanges between managers, builders, and collaborators."

Is it using email protocols to send messages or is it using email addresses as a proxy for usernames?

The claim of a drive for better conversations is not really that accurate because better conversations rely on a more universally used app/system than presently exists. Ie, a replacement that would have to grow internationally extraordinarily quickly.

Apple figured that out... iMessage was basically a cheat code to a vast userbase almost instantly. What Apple didn't figure, however, was that iMessage's green/blue thingy that went on for so long didn't really give android/sms users fomo, but really, it just created an unneeded communication barrier. Such barriers are the exact opposite of what is needed for a communication platform to be excellent. Unfortunately, decisions counter to what may be perceived as income generating are difficult to reverse.

These sorts of apps may not be revolutionary enough I fear. I would love to adopt something like this, but Meta continue to make too many billions to let their monopoly on human communication management to be taken away that easily.

bruce3434342• 6 months ago

Never heard of this before. Why would I use this? I am assuming the messages are not actually encrypted, because on their own privacy page they state that they "process" messages and attachments sent through birdychat. So are they processing the raw unencrypted data on their servers or what?

From a cursory glance of their CSAE policy, combined with the above, it seems they would be very eager to comply with the dreaded "chat control".

https://www.birdy.chat/privacy

Snoozus• 6 months ago

On the main page it states clearly that messages are e2e encrypted. So all they can collect is metadata.

rippeltippel2• 6 months ago

It is very possible that they process messages in the client app, before sending them.

WhatsApp does the same: have you noticed how the photos you receive have a debatable quality? Presumably (and hopefully) the sender's app downscaled them before e2e encryption.

bruce3434342• 6 months ago

From this it seems that whatsapp interop requires you to pass a url of the media, not the actual encrypted media. Aside from TLS, I'm not sure what encryption you get for attachments

https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...

ExoticPearTree8• 6 months ago

You just need to enable "HD videos & photos" option in the WhatsApp settings and then the pictures and movies sent via the app have a much higher quality.

neves3• 6 months ago

How to use it in Brazil? I don't trust Zuck.

B1FIDO6• 6 months ago

You now wish to use an app that freely interoperates now with Meta's WhatsApp, because you don't trust the guy who owns WhatsApp?

Trippy, dude!

booleandilemma• 6 months ago

I've recently been feeling like consumers overseas get better treatment from tech companies than us here in the US. Unskippable ads are illegal in Vietnam, and now Europeans get interoperable messaging in WhatsApp. Meanwhile here in the US we're getting shafted. When are we going to put our collective feet down and say enough is enough?

DeathArrow• 6 months ago

Still, no one will adopt BirdyChat because of this.

srikanthdotch• 6 months ago

The thing I hate most about WhatsApp is the number of ad messages from businesses. It’s almost unusable for me. I have no option to use anything else, as all my contacts use WhatsApp and the network effects lock me in.

Semaphor3• 6 months ago

As someone who never got any of those, is that like cold spam messages for businesses you don’t have as contacts? And can’t you just disable messages from unknown contacts?

Semaphor3• 6 months ago

Looks like it’s sadly mobile-only

globular-toast2• 6 months ago

Why would I use this closed source program instead of another closed source program. I don't trust some random company from Latvia any more than I trust Meta. We need this interop to be available for free software clients. I want something like Pidgin.

rw_grim4• 6 months ago

Well you can have it now... https://github.com/hoehermann/purple-gowhatsapp/

globular-toast2• 6 months ago

What's the catch?

vlz• 6 months ago

Currently, BirdyChat supports 1:1 chats, with group chat interoperability coming in a future update.

I wondered whether it can be used with Whatsapp groups: Apprently not yet.

j1elo5• 6 months ago

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 this app, so I thought that maybe other HNers might find it useful.

tngranados• 6 months ago

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

Kwpolska• 6 months ago

Same on Android.

marcandre• 6 months ago

Or from any browser: https://wa.me/<phone number, just the digits, starting with country code>

j1elo5• 6 months ago

In fact that's simply what the app does. It's just a handy way to have it on the phone as a shortcut and not having to remember the details of how to do it. Although with the sibling comments about Whatsapp itself allowing to do all this, the helper app seems less useful now.

phatfish• 6 months ago

Ah, this is handy, as Europe (even more than the UK somehow) seems to love engaging in customer service via WhatsApp. On the continent I end up having to use it to manage bookings for Hotels and restaurants. I removed my profile picture because of this.

Semaphor3• 6 months ago

Huh. Never had that here (Germany), otoh it’s super common in South Africa

RGBCube2• 6 months ago

You can just paste the number into the "start new chat" search input and start a chat from there. You don't need any of this.

j1elo5• 6 months ago

:-O

I didn't even suspected this was an option! I won't deny that I'm a bit distracted, but the UI discovery itself is also very poor.

aryehof2• 6 months ago

Only for “verified professionals”… “work email” please.

Find this exclusionary and distasteful.

aryehof2• 6 months ago

Only for “verified professionals”… “work email” please.

This isn't a general chat app alternative.

marcocastignoli• 6 months ago

Data BirdyChat collects:

Messages, attachments and other materials that you send through BirdyChat to your contacts;

No thanks

Etheryte2• 6 months ago

How do you think they would offer a messaging service if they didn't store the messages and attachments? The content has to live somewhere.

pnt12• 6 months ago

With ToS, we can assume that everything that is not laid down explicitly tends to err in favor of the company, not the user.

"we store all messages": they store everything and ther s no guarantee of processing, sharing or selling that data

"we store all messages encrypted end to end for sole the purposes of communication and can never access its contents" would provide many more guarantees.

patrickmcnamara• 6 months ago

This happens a lot on HN. I remember there was a court order for OpenAI to release ChatGPT chat history, and many of the comments were simply "why are they even storing chat history in the first place? ridiculous" as if that isn't a core feature of ChatGPT.

array_key_first• 6 months ago

I don't know, ask iMessage, Google messages, and, ironically, whatsapp.

hasel• 6 months ago

it lives on the user’s phone?

rbbydotdev2• 6 months ago

USA, which prides itself on freedoms, seems to have conceded a great deal of them when it comes to life online. From Apple apps, GPDR, now this. It sucks to see what we are missing out on.

Ylpertnodi• 6 months ago

GDPR?

rbbydotdev2• 6 months ago

Thank you

yosito• 6 months ago

US "freedom" is more propaganda than reality, and that's becoming more and more apparent.

znpy• 6 months ago

WhatsApp is currently rolling out interoperability support across Europe.

Does this mean i can chat with my whatsapp contacts without the whatsapp official app? I've been hating that for years.

I'd love to be able to get rid of it somehow.

wolvoleo8• 6 months ago

This will be really happy news for both birdychat users.

Ps: joking aside, this is kinda malicious compliance of WhatsApp, picking a chat app nobody uses.

s1mplicissimus• 6 months ago

I signed up for the waitlist weeks ago, but no actual access is available :/

freakynit• 6 months ago

I summarized all comments using LLM for better reading: https://hn-discussions.top/whatsapp-interoperability-europe/

BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

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