WhatsApp – About multi-device beta
faq.whatsapp.com
faq.whatsapp.com
Sure some people don’t find their chat history valuable. I do though and so do many others, it contains valuable information and memories. Is it the end of the world if it disappears? No, but it still sucks.
One day we will have a popular open protocol and client for instant messaging. One day…
Note that sometimes new standards are promoted specifically to destroy an existing open standard. The trick is to push hard for the new standard until it gets sort of popular and then back off. Adjust as required to keep things balanced.
Why? Unlike Matrix it's actually an Internet Standard.
But if I would have to bet on a standard which could become it right now, then it would be Matrix.
It convinces when it comes to adoption, concept, features and growth.
Should this be fixed (e.g. through regulation), XMPP is absolutely a sound choice - given, as you say, its 20 years of experience, evolution and deployment track record.
In theory, you could achieve with it what Matrix achieves, but it would probably be more feasible to start from scratch - like Matrix did
That said, I see how it currently has advantages when it comes to resource consumption as well as internal deployment to centralized services.
There has been a "Chat export" option for years. I even exported a chat of mine and ran it through some sentiment analysis for fun.
> shared / imported history between iOS and Android
Yeah this is perplexing. Android to android it works fine. The moment you throw Ios into the mix it gets complicated.
You've to do it manually for every chat, and it lacks all media. From the context of preserving your chat history, it's just marginally better than having nothing.
Except where they disable it, like in Germany (but haven't followed up on that story if it was resolved)
edit: seems to no longer be the case, time to run some backups!
There are some preconditions, it's not the easiest, but "no 3rd party" required so to speak
We have. It's called Matrix.
For example, I'd like to be able to use Signal on both my main phone and my second phone using the main phone number.
Second SIM bound to same identity isn't the same as non SIM adjunct device support.
I use both WhatsApp and telegram and to be honest in daily use they might as well be the same app.
Other than the fact that it's owned by Facebook, I don't see any issues.
For 1-1 or smaller chats they're mostly interchangeable except for Telegram's better support for multiple devices.
I've been chatting in unencrypted channels since the mid 90's so I don't exactly see E2EE as a hard requirement.
I'll switch my family chat to Signal or whatever as soon as I can add my home automation bot in there without some weird hacks or custom clients. The current implementation is a glorified Curl call for Discord and maybe 20 lines of Python for Telegram.
For Telegram Group Chat - it is not end-to-end encrypted, Telegram uses distributed infrastructure approach to protected data not covered by End-to-End encryption. I wouldn't consider WhatsApp's Group Chat end-to-end encrypted.
That's a pretty big issue for me - whilst the original team were in place, I had a degree of trust for them, but since their departure (and the stories as to why), I trust it less and less.
Unfortunately, for me and everyone I know - it's either iMessage or Whatsapp (depending on your choice of phone).
It's a pretty big issue, y'know.
Just went to web.whatsapp.com and made it a home screen shortcut in Safari.
It obviously isn't the final solution, but gives me a consistent interface across networks while I slowly grow my Matrix-native network.
I am self-hosting a Facebook bridge and Hangouts/Google Chat bridge amd using a hosted Telegram bridge.
4 devices is not enough, and it changes the end to end key for every device change so now i have to meet up and sync that again.
You have to trust them that "if the keys are the same in-person, then you're safe". But it's completely up to their implementation which we have no clue of.
You need to trust a lot of people to have any sanity. Adding WhatsApp on top of a pile of hundreds of companies isn’t that extreme.
I hope this is just for beta (and I assume they mean use WhatsApp on the phone) because otherwise it's just seems like a gotcha.
[Edit] Also this is one of those hateful sites which offers "manage your cookies" and all you get is how to clear cookies in the browser. That's not the idea.
> To achieve this, we had to rethink WhatsApp’s architecture and design new systems to enable a standalone multi-device experience while preserving privacy and end-to-end encryption.
There's a drop-down menu underneath the last-message received timestamp in the list of chats.
The current architecture is great: I have a single source of trust holding my encryption keys and a single place where I know all of my chats are being archived so I in turn have a single place I can backup and know I have a fully consistent history.
You know what I do want? I just want them to make their desktop app work on iPads and iPhones, so I can use my other phone or--and this seems like it should be "big" for a lot of people (and even sounds like the actual use case at least one person in this thread is excited about)--a tablet to access my account and full chat history.
This doesn't require any changes to their architecture, nor does it require them to do any complex encryption shenanigans they didn't already figure out; it doesn't break the "single source of truth" maxim that WhatsApp currently is best-of-breed at, and particularly for tablets it should be easy as AFAIK their desktop app is just an Electron app anyway: it couldn't take more than a week to port it!
And once you get the desktop app running on other phones, I claim you have solved at least 90% of the actual use cases people have had for "multi-device" for years.
The only case it doesn't handle, again, is the case where my phone is out of either battery or Internet and yet I have another device that has both... which is so rare in the lives of most of the people I know as to call into question the importance of waiting years to satisfy the 90% case of "I just want to use my iPad or my other phone to access my account while my normal phone is downstairs or at home or in my pocket... with Internet and power".
And OK: I know someone is going to now whine "well I had that situation come up once" or even "that happens to me all the time", but I want you to really sit back and think how often that happens, how likely it was, how common it is, and how avoidable it could be... I claim you would have to admit it is actually at best kind of a "you thing" that you have somehow have Internet access and power that you can't share with your phone.
As remember, and it sucks that I feel a need to underscore this: the current WhatsApp desktop experience doesn't require you to ever touch your phone. I am not claiming "just use your phone": I am saying that if the desktop "remote access to your account" app were running on your iPad and your other phones, it would almost certainly cover almost every use case you have...
...and that WhatsApp could have easily done that years ago, but for some reason they chose not to, which makes absolutely no sense to me as it is clearly trivial to do (and in fact people have built third party apps from scratch to do it over the same protocol with tiny teams of probably one person, and yet WhatsApp so far had not).
And if you haven't tried the desktop experience of WhatsApp: do it! It is actually really awesome. I am certainly not claiming it is perfect, and I am sure someone is itching to tell me of the time the app spazed our and all the chats appeared in the wrong order or it refused to connect to their phone until they re-paired it... but if you honestly compare it to pretty much any other chat app's desktop experience, I think you will have to admit that it is at least as good as even the best of them, with the only limitation hat your phone technically has to be "on" somewhere (which I will again claim is a minor inconvenience as you probably want your phone to be on for a number of non-WhatsApp reasons).
The only thing about it that actually limited use cases people seem to commonly have is that it doesn't run on mobile devices: if it did, I think most of this work would have seemed like a waste of time targeting a small niche use case (if what was already a niche use case, as I think most people only own a single phone anyway).