Unofficial WhatsApp API | Hacker News Reader

Unofficial WhatsApp API

github.com

79 pointsamjd32 comments

This reminds me of the days Gaim (now Pidgin) was playing catch-up with the Yahoo messenger protocol changes. I used to have entire days/weeks offline from IM because of these changes.

Fast-fwd 7-8 years, the same story, just different players. What's funnier is that WhatsApp actually uses modified XMPP software/protocol which should be open and free..

We get what we deserve.

Looks like we have come far away from standard federated XMPP. This is really depressing.

>should be open free

What are the license specifications of XMPP?

The protocol is an open standard, similar to HTTP. There's no license to speak of. There's many implementations of the standard, and those can have any license the developer wants, including making changes which break other clients.

If php is your thing, then there's another alternative: https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI

Which was IMHO the first of its kind.

That may well be the case but the python implementation that I've linked here is the best supported one right now. And AFAIK it is the only one which supports registration of new accounts.

Why would people spend time on this abomination of a technology? Instead of integrating with federated XMPP it uses closed garden modified XMPP incompatible with the standard. Instead of using normal security methodology it uses privacy breaching insecure by default approach. Proliferating anything of that is really really bad.

May be for security research this can be useful of course. But proliferating it for general purpose usage is harmful.

yowsup sounds interesting and worthwhile because people in the real world use whatsapp: basically all of my non-techie friends, for instance.

Make a secure alternative and convince normals to use it and I'll gladly switch.

None of my non technical friends use it. I'm yet to meet anyone who does. If anything, many of them use Skype (which I don't use either, and which isn't any better than Whatsapp).

Whatsapp and FB messenger are the two most popular cross platform IMs amongst my non-techy friends. I guess it varies wildly based on your circles, and possibly your region

WhatsApp is the most used messenger application by a huge margin outside of the US. Everyone under 25 I know that doesn't have an iPhone uses WhatsApp.

That's pretty bad, and Whatsapp developers should be blamed for proliferating a closed and non federated IM service. As if we need more of those.

Why would people spend time on this abomination of a technology?

Because people use it, presumably. Federated XMPP: lovely, just fantastic. Next to no users.

So, what stopped Whatsapp from make a standard federated XMPP service? Selfishness or stupidity? Nothing seems to technically have prevented that.

That's a different question. And no-one but WhatsApp can answer it, really.

Someone should write a transport for XMPP servers with this, like what exist for MSN et all. (transports are services that interface XMPP networks with others, they run server side, see http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0100.html You would have instantly access to the WA network from any Xmpp client (with concurrent sessions). maybe I should look into this myself :)

Looks like there already exists one: https://github.com/stv0g/transwhat

As long as I'm not able to log in on my smartphone AND laptop at the same time all of this whatsapp api will be kind of useless in my opinion. I want to chat with whatsapp on my computer,that's sure,but I don't want to re-register every time I switch from phone to computer or vice versa.

Lets say I have access to a smartphone and I can do everything on it. So if I am able to pull off all the parameters which are used for password, can I impersonate the cell owner? Whatever complex server side code Whatsapp will use, without password, I think it would only be security through obscurity.

Although it's not that easy extracting the password from a WhatsApp installation, it's very much possible. [1] However, since WhatsApp supports only one active session at a time, whenever the second user logs in, the other will be logged out.

[1] https://github.com/shirioko/MissVenom

Unrelated to your comment but relevant: I had my friend's number saved on my phone, but we were not in touch for over an year; one day I installed WhatsApp and saw him there - I pinged him; the response came, "Who the fk are you, you b*d! There is no <my friend's name> here. Go to hell!!".

Turns out my friend had changed the number, so the cell number was released and assigned to another user after few months but WhatsApp on my phone thought it was my friend on the other side.

That was when I knew WhatsApp is not revolutionary, it's just lazy, convenient and famous.

So in other words, you got the exact same response as if you had sent a regular SMS message; I fail to see how that is a problem. Yes, WhatsApp uses your regular phone contacts; much simpler than having to exchange usernames with everyone you want to message on WhatsApp. Is it revolutionary? No, it's a simple, cheap, cross-platform messaging app. It does what it's meant to do, and does it pretty well.

Exactly. I don't see how that shows a shortcoming on WhatsApp's part.

It is because using a location and operator dependant phone number as the main gateway to reach someone is prone to errors and no longer necessary.

Whatsapp using it just show how bad its architecture is.

Can this be used to make a webapp? I love whatspp but don't always have my phone on me. Wished there was a webapp that allowed me to chat with groups I have in whatsapp

Sure it can. There's also a php API which I linked in one of the older comments. You can use either of these to create your own web client.

Someone ported the php implementation to Nodejs and made a working web client but it's broken now and is no longer maintained IIRC.

http://whatsapp.filshmedia.net/

You can take a look at its github repo and fix it yourself if you're familiar with Nodejs.

This is written in Python, so does that mean that your smartphone needs to run python in order to create a Whatspp compatible smartphone app?

No, client can be built on any platform. The client interacts with the server which plugs into the API which is in Python. You can even build a wrapper around the API in your preferred language and have it interact with the API.

Wrapper is preferable in case you want to enhance the functionality provided by the whatsapp API.

Urgh, this was my little secret for developping a webapp :) I guess we should open source one then

Let's see it on github!

Soon, I have, like probably many a person here. A to-do list longer than my life will allow me!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com