How “brittle” are the integrations? I guess I mean is this a supported feature of all the 3rd party services or do you have to rely on hooking into undocumented apis that could change at any time etc.
I'm not sure if I'd ever pay $10/mo for a service whose main selling point is running what are essentially reverse-engineered hacks. Some of the integrations use the official available API (like the Telegram one) but others (like the Whatsapp and Signal ones) run on altered web client code. Furthermore, in most commercial chat systems, alternative clients are usually not allowed and can lead to a ban of your account if the server considers you a bot.
The product is a worthy attempt at fixing the mess that is modern chat solutions, but from my experience I just don't trust the system enough to switch.
Also keep in mind that any e2e encryption platforms like Signal and Whatsapp provide is made worthless if you use a bridge; I haven't seen any bridge use Matrix's e2e encryption yet and your messages are all being decrypted on the server regardless.
Ideally I would not want to run the whole stack if I understand how the E2E encryption is managed.
It makes zero sense that you don't have access to the messages.
If the basic concepts of "E2E key exchange" and "pass this encrypted message" exist at all points, I see no fundamental problems with having E2E encryption across different networks. I can see potential for lots of the normal practical small problems but it could fundamentally work.
There are two encrypted channels: client<->bridge, and bridge<->WhatsApp. The bridge can read the decrypted text, and the comment I replied to is a lie.
I’d appreciate a blog post explaining the architectural choices here.
This jumped out at me:
>we send each user a Jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed which bridges to iMessage
I couldn't tell if that was some sort of joke or if it meant something different to how I was reading it?
Being open source is great, but to be honest I lack the time (and expertise) to see how all the integrations work. A page that describes a high level overview of how this works exactly might build more trust.
Good luck!
I remember chatting with the Meebo founders about some of this. They didn't really have an answer to why AIM, YIM, and MSN Messenger wouldn't block them beyond it being bad for their networks. On how they'd make money, I don't remember hearing any interesting answers. They never really figured out the money thing and ended up getting acquihired by Google.
The did have a crazy-impressive web UI for the mid-2000s; for a while, that know-how was probably their most valuable asset. The need and the market still (and have always) kinda exited, but the players changed a lot in the last 15 years. One of their business ideas was to pivot into a commercial support chat app. People use them today, so maybe they were before their time, or maybe B2B was never in their DNA.
It’s why apps like desktop Chrome have extremely aggressive automatic-update schemes which are near-impossible to disable if you’re ever connected to the internet.
iOS users upgrade pretty quick, but Android users don't. There are lots of phones with not very much storage, so upgrading is painful for users and they turn off auto-updates and don't update frequently.
And when you add on end of life platforms that have enough users you don't want to cut off, but not enough users that you want to do active development, or the platform owner won't sign packages anymore, you have to support some clients for a long time.