Meta obviously don't want that and they've done a sneaky thing to make it useless: if you connect a third party app to WhatsApp, from that third party app you can only chat with other WhatsApp contacts that have also connected the same third party app to WhatsApp. So if you write your own WhatsApp client that runs on this low power phone it will be completely useless because to chat with your friends they would all have to manually connect their WhatsApps to your client, which of course they won't do.

See https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability... - check the `WhatsApp Messaging Interoperability User Experience - Android`

I guess we'll see if the EU lets this stand but my guess is they will.

For all the EU does right, it's amazing that a reviled United States conglomerate owns their entire social sphere. I hope they can change that and show the world a model of how to do so, especially given how high the stakes are.