Whatsapp Web | Hacker News Reader

Whatsapp Web

web.whatsapp.com

131 pointsbenjlang108 comments

A lot of negativity, but despite its limitations I already love it. (OK love's too much, but it's a big improvement for me at least.)

I don't use whatsapp with a huge number of people, but some of them I talk to daily on it. When we're both behind a computer (work hours, sometimes outside them) we'll often move to Skype to be able to type quicker. Skype's pretty horrible on phones (for me and most people I know), so usually prefer whatsapp when not using PCs/laptops.

Sure it's not a huge change, but just being able to type quickly when sat at my laptop, and not needing to keep grabbing my phone to see what's been said, is a great change for me. One that I was complaining about just the other day without realising this was around the corner.

In case anyone's interested, here's what it looks like for me in Chrome (nothing unexpected really): http://i.imgur.com/90C0v9V.png

(Added bonus in the required app upgrade for WP8: message delivery status icons now shown in list of conversation, rather than just once you are inside a conversation - I know this feature was on at least one platform months ago, maybe all others, and it's [very slightly] annoyed me since I moved to Windows)

While I agree with all your points it's still the shittiest implementation that I have seen. I have been using Telegram Web, and it works delightfully without having to connect my phone to the web. Line has it's own desktop program since at least a year.

I have no idea why they decided to go this route, none whatsoever. It looks more like a hack than an official solution. I've been following Whatsapp since 2010, and to me it always has looked like a bad company. They haven't really taken care of the security of their platform until they have reached 500 million users. The more I read about Whatsapp, the more I think that they just got lucky.

This is a very similar implementation with how Blackberry Blend is implemented. Although, the core value was for security. It's definitely hard to understand what was the motivation for WhatsApp to go this route or what their future plans are.

You're right it does feel like a hack, but one that works fine for me at least. I guess my comments were those of a user thinking about how it works for me, not a technical critique at all.

> not needing to keep grabbing my phone to see what's been said, is a great change for me. One that I was complaining about just the other day without realising this was around the corner.

Just try, with some friends, to switch to Telegram for a day or two. It is like Whatsapp but has open source clients for most platforms that always sync between them. I have the Windows and Android clients open most of the time and don't even think any more about whether I have to contact this or that friend by typing on my laptop, desktop or phone.

There's other arguments like the open API, the team's dedication to security from the start, the ability to invite people to chat with you via a URL/username (so they won't know your phone number), it has an open sticker system (using WebP), etc. but the way the clients work seamlessly is why I can't stop bothering those people I still start up Whatsapp or Skype for to make them switch (and quite a few have already).

I'll try it out (installing app on phone now), but can't see it coming close to replacing either Skype or WhatsApp. Skype because in many of my circles is the de facto for business communication, WhatsApp because it's so simple (no need to add new contacts - they're already there!)

On the subject of telegram's "dedicated to security from the start" - I'm sure I remember (though could be either wrong or outdated) that it's encryption was mocked by experts when it launched, which is (I think) why I never bothered with it before now. Is it actually as secure as it wants to be?

Here's a start of what you need to know;

http://paulmillr.com/posts/the-story-of-telegram/

Have you considered Google Hangouts? I tend to use that for most of my chatting, so never really "got" whatsapp.

I don't know anyone who uses them - or at least, nobody has ever suggested I use them. And I haven't been interested enough to try myself to consider converting other users. I've got enough communication routes already without adding a new one unless it can either replace one of the current ones (I won't get all my friends who use whatsapp to switch so it won't do that) or I need it to talk to a subset of people I know (not the case currently with hangouts - this was why I started using whatsapp in the first place, though)

Hangouts is pretty good. Now it doesn't require you to have Google+ account, and (unlike Whatsapp) you don't _need_ to use a phone number that's tied to a telco, and it handles multiple accounts pretty well.

Does not work for iOS yet? Edit: "At this time, WhatsApp Web is available only for Android, Windows Phone, Nokia S60, BlackBerry and BB10 smartphones." https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080003

"Unfortunately for now, we will not be able to provide web client to our iOS users due to Apple platform limitations." http://blog.whatsapp.com/614/WhatsApp-Web

<del>Assumption: WhatsApp for iOS is in the 5 business day App Store approval queue.</del>

"Unfortunately for now, we will not be able to provide web client to our iOS users due to Apple platform limitations."

And even if they could, I'd doubt that they'd make Facebook wait 5 days for their app to be aproved.

Assumption: the platform limitation is that it's not allowed to run an app (continuously) in the background, which is required for WhatsApp web

Apple's browser is probably lacking necessary features. They have been much slower adopting features than the competition.

It's not the browser ... the iOS app doesn't yet have the capability to scan the QR code to link your account to the website

> They have been much slower adopting features than the competition.

It's not a matter of speed. This seems to be using WebRTC for handling communications between the phone app and the browser. Safari has chosen not to implement WebRTC and so far it is still not a proper standard so I can see why. Google, as the developer of WebRTC, will obviously support it right away. Note that no browser other than Chrome can be used as well.

Wait, you know that WebKit is spearheaded by Apple? And that there's two completely unrelated problems here:

1. The frontend only works on Chrome for desktop (it appears only because it uses the non-standards track filesystem API)

2. The backend service and mobile app does not work with iOS (it appears because it uses background networking)

They may seem related, but they aren't.

That doesn't seem likely to me: what features does iOS not have right now, that this is likely to use? It seems more likely if they are targeting chrome only they did it to avoid the support overhead of making it work in multiple browsers.

So what exactly is whatsapp web?

[edit] Found the answer at https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080003

> WhatsApp Web is a computer based extension of the WhatsApp account on your phone. The messages you send and receive are fully synced between your phone and your computer, and you can see all messages on both devices. Any action you take on the phone will apply to WhatsApp Web and vice versa.

Heck of a roll-out, guys.

  - only works on one browser
  - requires interop with the mobile app
  - supporting mobile app version on Android only
  - supporting mobile app version not universally available on Android, presumably because of Google Play registry population or something.

Also works with mobile apps for WP, BB and BB10. Only iOS support is missing, really.

And every single other major browser.

I'm using Chromium, says it only supports Chrome. Can we shave some characters off the regex here?

As a temporary solution, you could spoof the user agent by running chromium from command line: chromium-browser --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.1132.47 Safari/536.11"

I changed the UA on Frirefox, then whatsapp web started working. Firefix even showed desktop notifications.

BTW, you cannot have two web sessions going on at the same time. Once you start a new session on one browser, other detects and prompts

"WhatsApp Web is open on another computer or browser. Click “Use Here” to use WhatsApp Web in this window."

also, it needs phone to be connected to whatsapp service. So it sync from phone to your browser.

It works quite well. They've done a great job at following Google's "Material Design" prescriptions while -- surprisingly -- not actually using the Polymer framework. First time I've seen that.

The app loads some interesting libraries:

* CryptoJS 3.1.2 (for AES and HMAC-SHA256)

* punycode 2.1.4

* bluebird 2.5.3

* React 0.12.2 (with addons)

It's entirely possible that they really are doing end-to-end crypto...

They did this recently:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/18/whatsapp_...

> WhatsApp Web only works in Google Chrome.

It's 2015, and we're still using browser compatibility checks.

So it seems to do some pairing between your phone and chrome? Not really what I call a web version. A real web version would run on, you know, any reasonably recent web browser.

I think the point of the pairing itself is more just to make sure people only have as many WhatsApp accounts as they have phone numbers. Not sure why it's Chrome only, though.

I suspect that pairing is needed only to not use an account other that phone number

There is a very good criticism here: http://andregarzia.com/posts/en/whatsappdoesntunderstandthew... and I have to agree to all of it.

I appreciate most an Open API the same way Telegram[1] does. But at least, this is a -somewhat acceptable- first step.

[1] https://core.telegram.org/

Strange that this isn't on the frontpage, anyhow, for people who can't get it working for Android, try the following APK: http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/whatsapp-inc/whatsapp/whatsapp-... (yes, it's not the newest release but they did a rollback after this version removing the web menu item). Reboot your phone after installing.

I have been using whatsapp-purple---a WhatsApp protocol implementation of libpurple [1] for some time now and it works really well.

That being said, accessing it from within a browser window has it's advantage. I currently have to install whatsapp-purple on all machines I use & syncronising chatlogs via Dropbox has it's challenges...

[1] https://github.com/davidgfnet/whatsapp-purple

To make the 'Whatasapp web' option show on the latest Android version on my phone I had to do this:

1. Back up your data (Whatsapp Menu > Settings > Chat Settings > Backup conversations)

2. Go to 'App Info' for Whatsapp had to 'Clear data' (Settings > Applications > Applications Manager > Whatsapp)

3. Restart phone

4. Access whatsapp -> enter your phone number -> restore from backup

5. The 'Whatsapp Web' should appear under menu now

yes this works, but will reset all stats :(... i restored my titaium backup... i still missing the Web Entry in menu :(

Worked for me, Android 4.3 + Galaxy S3. Thanks!

This is truly useless, It needs your phone to stay on to access the web version. And why is it a web version if only Google Chrome is supported.

I couldn’t figure out a way to install this.

Looks like it's only compatible with Chrome at the moment, and no iOS support.

https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080002

It looks like it's only on Android/Windows/Blackberry

Install or sign in?

It seems you need a version of WhatsApp on your phone that isn't out yet.

Indeed. Play Store says I have the latest version... anybody have a working apk?

Try the following APK: http://www.apkmirror.com/apk/whatsapp-inc/whatsapp/whatsapp-.... (yes, it's not the newest release but they apparently did a rollback after this version removing the web menu item)

I know everyone is complaining about Chrome only support, but the more important question we should be asking is what technology stack are they using for the web client?

It's well documented that Whatsapp is a Erlang shop.

Did they stay with using Erlang for the web as well ... or did they switch to another technology like Nodejs, etc?

They seem to be using React for the View rendering. Websockets for data. Bluebird for promises. Google's CryptoJS for end-to-end encryption. MomentJS for time formatting.

The code seems to be pretty modular There are some nice gems in it like EXIF format decoding etc. This is nice to reverse engineer :)

They should have waited with the announcement until they got more browsers supported. This is really frustrating.

Sure, but they gotta start somewhere.

It's 2015, we use multiple devices, phones, tablets, computer, smart TVs, and they still didn't figure that out?

Come on, ICQ, Telegram, Groupme, Viber and tons of other apps have multiple clients for multiple devices.

Sadly people take too long to change, or else WhatsApp would be dead already.

This is sweet.

I like being able to chat with my friends while I am at work so I'm glad to see WhatsApp bringing web access.

Hopefully iOS support is around the corner, but given how often iOS gets preferential treatment over Android, I'm okay with my Droid friends getting first crack at it.

Its awesome, I can save my phone battery by switching it off and leaving only whatsapp on! boom!

No its not. Your phone needs to stay on the whole time.

Really.. I use a dumb feature phone and the only thing I want in is whatsapp..

Thought of signing in once with a smart phone and using it forever and continue using my dumb phone..

Damn, you're right! That's a bit of a downer :(

Can anybody explain how this is supposed to work in combination with the end-to-end encryption that's allegedly implemented in the Android client? I can see all my Android to Android conversations in the Web client.

While maybe not directly on topic, I've never seen the point of Whatsapp over plain SMS, or for that matter any of the other chat apps that can do way more (Google Hangouts, Skype, etc)... what's the point?

In some countries the price per SMS is not null. Also you have received verification. And group messaging with some features that are not available in MMS. Also end to end encryption.

What did they do in an add-on that won't work in Firefox? Chrome add-ons and Firefox add-ons are rather close; I have one that has about 80% common code.

Doesn't work, apparently you need to scan the code from your phone's WhatsApp which you can't due to lack of that functionality.

This is apparently not available in my country (Brazil) ...

Whatsapp version 2.11.476 updated on 16 jan 2015

I guess it's only limited to US and other regions.

Used a US VPN to see whats the latest version and its 2.11.491, which is the same as installed version on mine (India). However, I still don't see the option to scan QR code.

I'm on WP8 which I imagine you probably aren't, so this may not be useful to you, but in case it's relevant across platforms, or in case there are any WP8 readers:

a.) I updated when I saw this HN submission, a 17mb update, to version 2.11.634 (it didn't updated automatically, but was available when I checked my app store)

b.) Opening whatsapp after the update showed it had updated (I could see some other features that had changed), but I couldn't find the web option. After killing whatsapp and restarting it, it then appeared on a menu where it hadn't been before

It's finally working for me, so i guess it will be available worldwide :D

I thought that Whatsapp didn't store (or read) messages, and that was why it was so secure / awesome?

So how can they do this?

I think they still don't store it, What there are doing here is syncing all messages from phone to web when paired. FAQ clearly mentions that web version connects with phone to sync data - https://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/web/28080002

You're mistaken, they do store. And don't hide it.

Also they don't even encrypt, they send messages over the air in plain text. YAY $16 billion!

Hopefully that will change soon.

https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/

Ugh. This is why I was saying before that I'm quite worried that Whatsapp itself didn't come out and say publicly that it uses TextSecure's end-to-end protocol, and that we should stop praising them for "adopting end-to-end encryption" until they actually say they did (for which I got downvoted).

https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/

Didn't WhatsApp integrate TextSecure?

How is dropping a message to someone who is not online or cannot be reached at that instant because of network connectivity awesome?

You must be mixing it with Snapchat.

Note that AFAIR the reason wasn't so that it was more secure, but to remind users that Snapchat is about the instant and so that users wouldn't expect it to store all of their lives, only the right now.

A cheap and easy way to keep your storage needs low, if you ask me.

Why it's called web client if: WhatsApp Web only works in Google Chrome and do not work with iOS?

Which version of Android app do you use?

2.11.498 seems don't work for me. There isn't a WhatsappWeb option.

I'm running 2.11.498 (just updated) on my Android phone and the menu option is there. The new web.whatsapp.com just started working for me this morning.

(I'm on Chrome OS.)

How did you even get 2.11.498 (which seems to be newer than mine but still not latest)? I'm trying to download and all I get is 2.11.491.

From Play Store. I think version varies with device.

On WhatsApp site there's still your version.

I think that version is for Nexus 5. I can't install 491, and 498 doesn't have the menu option :(

I have been waiting for this move for a long time, but, badly, doesn't support iOS yet :-S

Really?

http://imagebin.org/328080

FYI Google Chrome warns that imagebin.com "might contain malware".

Unfortunately it is not a desktop client and you have to open the browser all the time to open it.

Use this to get a desktop client on mac

http://lifepluslinux.blogspot.in/2015/01/whatsapp-web-deskto...

I'd love to see them open source this react material design implementation.

I had to restart my phone to see the whatsapp web menu option. I am on Android.

I like it. This was certainly needed; especially when I am working.

I dont see whatsapp web on whatsapp menu of my computer.

Why does this completely destroy the back button?

Back button is not working in Chrome on Mac

how this web hide the scripts tags? and how hide the scripts (js) from the resources tab from the rdeveloper tools?

Pleeeease don't hijack my back button

installed newest Android version. Does not work here. No option for scanning QR

Did you try:

Menu -> Whats App Web?

There's no option called 'WhatsApp Web". I'm on 2.11.491

My friend said it took a few seconds, then the option appeared. Sorry for the 2nd hand account. I'm on iOS.

Same here.

It was written using reactJS!

It was written using reactJS

Not working for me yet.

Doesn't work for iOS! Better not release it then! :)

iOS users should already be resigned that they'll always receive updates later

Why not?

v2.11.498 working

The title should more correctly say "Whatsapp for Google Chrome". You can't really say it's for "web" if Chrome is the only browser you support.

Maybe they're doing client-side encryption in JavaScript? Apparently native JS crypto is incomplete in Firefox: http://caniuse.com/#feat=cryptography

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