WhatsApp doesn't understand the web
andregarzia.com
andregarzia.com
I'm still finding my way trough this UI (Why is there no 'inbox' with replies to your comments?!)
It does, it's at bottom of each page
P.S. TIL some people automatically downvote any post containing the word 'reddit'.
Did you come from /r/programming? There have been a few comment threads talking about hacker news recently.
HN just has a poorly designed interface.
No I didn't come from /r/programming, or reddit for that matter.
This isn't a perfect system but it's much better than being too strict about reposts. We're going to work on a more effective dupe detection system as soon as we can get to it.
WhatsApp had a POTENTIALLY massive commercial use here and they blew it with paid subscriptions (which people in my country can't pay through Apple/Google stores). So people started switching their mobile numbers to get back into WhatsApp, which actually was really bad for WhatsApp but they blindly saw that as success. Their growth team probably said: "We are killing it because more and more people are signing up!" Yeah, but what's the churn rate? It's probably huge as well. These unique mobile users that they counted were actually the same people who couldn't find a way to pay.
Ok, so if anyone from Whatsapp happened to read my post, here is how you can make (or could have made) money: - Charge businesses to communicate with their clients through WhatsApp. This is very straightforward -- businesses need A MAC/PC CLIENT for their team to talk to customers. I know our tech company wanted it, but you wouldn't let third party clients exist. So we sticked with Viber and Telegram. Luckily regular users also ditched WhatsApp.
And look, we were not the only ones who needed it. The guy selling shoes/clothes would show products through WhatsApp. The local florist would show what he had available on particular day through pics on WhatsApp. Then he got tired of sending these pics to everyone, so he wanted to have these pics in his profile page. So who offered multiple pics in the profile? Telegram did. As much as I hated their deceptive claim about "being the most secure app", they actually managed to listen to users.
I haven't seen this, but I'm on Windows Phone, so perhaps it's platform-specific?
Just like in Argentina in '11 I was amazed that all SME had Facebooks, and were just skipping the website-part I was used to.
Funny how local circumstances (might your Whatsapp problem just be an upload-to-US problem?) create different business environments. It reminds me that country-specific network and adoption effect exist and matter.
For example, Facebook ads are really picking up here. Of course, most small businesses cannot pay to Facebook directly due to tight payment regulations. So what happens? A middle man comes in. He signs up as a Facebook partner (or regular user), finds small local businesses that pay him extra and then he pays Facebook through his internationally accepted cards to show ads belonging to others.
I have no doubt that if American companies came here and tried a little, they would quickly realize that Uzbeks are entrepreneurs, who can be good partners and can make lots of money.
Even the ideas that I see pop up in the United States have been implemented here long time ago. For instance, we had car-sharing service in Uzbekistan since I was a child -- we just didn't have GPS and mobile phones to make an Uber, so we had middle men finding riders and putting them into one car. Then the driver would pay a fee for that.
Same thing with delivery -- we had delivery services, which you could call, so they could find the closest person to you (or the store/pharmacy) and deliver the items quickly. You would just pay cash to the driver (which of course had to be trustworthy-- otherwise delivery service wouldn't work with them)
The "Middle Man" has been replaced with technology because it's more efficient and enables more liquidity than an actual man or a network of men could.
If you see solutions popping up in Uzbekistan for basic logistical problems such as transportation and delivery, perhaps you should try to implement them elsewhere? I would be interested to hear more examples that could be implemented elsewhere in the world.
I've lived in a country where LINE, an IM/Call/Video/Games/etc is hugely popular.
Companies have official accounts which works for a couple of reasons:
1. Sometimes they gets automatically added to your list I think. I might have just forgotten how I got them though do don't quote me on this.
2. App specific promotions "follow us for xy and z". I guess this is the ads you're wondering about, it's basically a "100%" impression rate towards costumers you already know is interested in your brand.
3. Stickers are something that are huuuuge. Companies can create their own cute ones that obviously include the logo in one way or another. People then get them for free or buy them. I think companie pay to have them in the store for free, while paid stickers gives LINE a cut.
4. General curiosity from costumers, "Hm I wonder if AirAsia has a LINE account, maybe they have some discount there?"
Obviously you can block each account if you so please.
But my whole family still uses it. Also I've seen, the younger people use the group-chat functionality rather often.
I only use it to talk to my family. For the rest I use TextSecure.
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=web.whatsapp....
Are they serious???
- Vulnerable to POODLE
- too short HSTS value
- RC4
- SSL3
EDIT: As only Chrome is supported, RC4 & SSL3 are moot.
Whatsapp, is a messaging-routing platform. It doesnt store any messages. Thats what makes whatsapp strong. Its a feature. Thats why you need your phone. Its like SMS. They are not storing all your sensitive message.
If you dont care about storing sensitive messages on servers. Use Telegram/Facebook Messaging, etc...
I think its really a feature, that its not storing your messages.
If I want persistent group chat I'll use Hangouts or IRC/XMPP/Jabber etc. I have hundreds of options for that.
In what way is, for example, Hangouts slow?
Recently my Z10 got bricked. The only backup available was from April 2014. I bought a new Z10 and restored the backup on that phone. I was expecting that all WhatsApp messages and pictures received between April 2014 and the restoration date would not be available. But, WhatsApp did somehow pull the messages and pictures from recent months. So, where did it restore the messages/pictures from? From other contacts' phones?
Just because they say they don't store them forever really doesn't mean much, and I am pretty surprised by how many people on HN keep repeating it.
I think it would be short-sighted to assume they aren't storing your messages somewhere.
SMS are stored while awaiting delivery during a certain period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_service_technical...
She can't understand why she has to pick up the phone to use Whatsapp. Her solution has been to just use Facebook messenger instead.
That was my reaction as well when I considered whatsapp: Why would I sign up for a IM service which only works on my phone?
You may play this as a strength, but for a considerable amount of the user-base it seems like a pointless limitation. And the user-base sees that every other competitor offers this feature, and to them whatsapp is suddenly no longer that interesting.
I mean, there have been web chats for decades now, so I don't understand why they invented such a messed up set of constraints.
Besides, am I the only one who suspects that Whatsapp is boycotting Apple? They needed almost 2 months to get an iOS 8 update out, now they are limiting the "web" application to non-Apple users...
I understand the theory but all this does is hurt them. They need as many people as possible using there app for it be useful. They're also owned by Facebook who update all their apps weekly.
I feel the opposite. Why should I have 1 slow, bogged down app when I can have two fast, functional ones?
Cyanogenmod has Privacy Guard, which is pretty much that.
Clearly every point in the chain matters, but it always surprised me that a company that puts so much emphasis on security and privacy thinks it's a good idea to keep your messages in the cloud:
"Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram is cloud-based and heavily encrypted. As a result, you can access your messages from several devices at once"[1]
Unfortunately, it sounds like that's not what Telegram is doing with its non-"secret" messages.
Of course, whatsapp could register devices which are thrown away after x days without delivery then store the messages until delivered to all end devices but that's likely a core infrastructure update which would require them to store more data, not the same as just writing another client.
Still, what they've created as a web client is a little batty; typically I'd want to use those when I can't find my phone.
I know, this is a wild guess. Id rather use whatsapp.
I confess, I've never used it and don't want to pass judgment without actually checking it out but if what the article describes is true than, yeah, they screwed this one up big time.
I'm always logged in so this is a non-issue for me.
I have cursed the lack of a desktop client often.
This presents obvious problems with having not just a web client, but any client other than the main device, since the main device is the only store of the existing conversations. New messages sent also need to be synchronized across devices, which I presume is why it's required to keep your phone connected to the Internet. Otherwise Whatsapp would need keep conversations on their servers until they could be synced, which is very much not their model.
Details on their architecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs
http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...
If the system is reliant on the main device, what happens if that gets run over or destroyed? WhatsApp have no control over the fate of the device. Why wouldn't they store the messages on the server and sync from that? WhatsApp have control of the fate of their own servers, which is far more reliable, SURELY.
If I send a new message from a device, either the other devices can poll periodically for messages that I have sent, or they can use WebSockets and be notified when a new message is sent, or when the app opens it can fetch all the recent messages that I have sent from other devices. It isn't difficult with a fine grained timestamp, surely? That's what Google Talk does.
You'd only need to order my messages by timestamp to get all messages that I had sent.
It's a bit of a daft architecture if it is incapable of this basic mechanism, isn't it?
If you want a better UX there are hundreds of other options available.
Are all the messages kept on the phone?
How does it relate to the Whisper Systems end to end encryption on the Android to Android version of WhatsApp?
Is there some relationship between the two - is this very bizarre web interface there because of constraints relating to privacy and encryption?
i.e. WhatsApp don't have your messages.
[Edit] Is it peer to peer in some fancy way - is it only for Chrome because it uses WebRTC or something?
It seems to be trying to keep the link between users and phone numbers as 1:1 as possible. This has a number of effects against bots and spam, ties in with matching users from other user's addressbooks etc. It's probably also bad for privacy/pseudonymity.
Might have been in this video [1]... Not sure at the moment (will check later when im out of the office).
"What protocol is used in Whatsapp app? SSL socket to the WhatsApp server pools. All messages are queued on the server until the client reconnects to retrieve the messages. The successful retrieval of a message is sent back to the whatsapp server which forwards this status back to the original sender (which will see that as a "checkmark" icon next to the message). Messages are wiped from the server memory as soon as the client has accepted the message"
[1] http://www.quora.com/What-is-WhatsApps-server-architecture
I switched initially because I was a bit uncomfortable with having long, personal conversations on a Facebook-owned property with no export capabilities, but I've been getting more and more of my friends to switch simply because of the very solid web and desktop apps. And even though they complain initially about installing 'yet another app', in practice it's no trouble (since they only have to use the two apps on mobile, where using both is not really an issue).
The main thing I'm wondering, I guess, is: is it mostly perception that keeps people within one mobile chat ecosystem, or am I underestimating how difficult it is for the average user to use more than one app, and/or slowly move to another app?
From their "web client": Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10, and Nokia S60.
(In all fairness, my guess is it's pending acceptance of a newer version by the iOS/iTunes review team, but I really hope that's the case.)
EDIT: Scratch that. They're not providing it on iOS because of how convoluted their approach to a web client is. What they have to say: "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
Yeah, right.
Scan a QR code from the client on your phone, and re-authentiate every time the connection is interrupted.
If you don't use a supported platform, like a Blackberry, you pretty much have no way of communicating with anyone in China, since you can't login to the web client.
No whatsapp, no women. I really like women.
Doesn't excuse the Chrome-only-ness, though.
This "web client" is not actually a web client - it's just an app for your phone that you can display on your computer monitor.
Android support is a bit buggy though - for example Skype sometimes breaks (can not send messages), but Spotify and WhatsApp have worked perfectly fine.
If you are interested in it, they dropped the price a while back (down to 250eur).
The only problematic app is WhatsApp because the notifications only go into the native Sailfish notification area when an Android app is in the foreground.
Many apps and copy&pasting between native/Android apps were fixed in the last Sailfish version released 3 weeks ago.
Whatsapp apps miss very many people who'd use it if they could.
http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
I suppose the benefits of supporting the remaining 5% against the costs of having to develop and mantain another client(s) have been discussed internally in Whatsapp.
"It would be nice" and "it would be commercially sound" are very different propostions.
Would be commercially sound to support these "plenty of people" ?
If there's a legitimate security benefit from What's App, then perhaps that's compelling, but trusting a Facebook company with anything remotely related to privacy and security is a fool's errand. Zuck has yet to prove that privacy and security matter.
For secure messaging I generally use a courier and a message written on paper using a one-time pad. Slower but more secure. If it goes over a wire, the odds of it being actually secure are low, unless you handle the encryption and control the keys yourself.
If the app isn't running on the phone then there shouldn't be any need for the phone to be connected to the internet ("Mistake Three" in the article)
The new web developers generation just replaced IE with Chrome.
The only thing I see that it can't is the desktop notification, which you still have some ability, in fact 'pinned' sites in IE let you have a number badge on the taskbar, which is quite good for a chat app, see Skype.
Now all that's keeping people there is network effect. Telegram is just better at this point, and it works on almost every platform with no weird restrictions
You can fetch source code from https://telegram.org/apps
Frankly, I hope those apps will all be gone and forgotten in favor of an actual open sourced, widely used protocol. Or maybe they'd incorporate one. But in any case, I think it's a shame that when email is decentralized, chatting is not.
Using a QR to facilitate login is not a bad decision. Having this as the only method to authenticate makes it a bad client because it can't work as a standalone offering.
I don't like when "web clients" are not full featured in the sense of allowing registration and login. Look at Evernotes, you can register and use thru the web client interface, there is no need for the app if you're on a platform that is not supported.
EDIT: If you feel the need to use cutesy graphics to get your point across, at least make them static. Animated gifs are incredibly distracting when trying to read anything more involved than a tweet, or a silly meme macro.
Great marketing!
I don't care if it works only on chrome and doesn't work on the iPhone. They'll most probably fix it soon.
I can think of one good reason why not having official APIs has been in whatsapp's favour. Almost no spam.
1st your career is too short to fully understand the web and be able to judge a company like facebook.
2nd you haven't realized that whatsapp might be its own company but its owned by facebook, and after the buyout facebook did a clear up on devs and hired / assigned their own devs to that.
3rd you haven't realized that the power of the web is fading over the power of mobile web!
I understand that that's a blog and you are free to express your thoughts, but I am really repulsed by the fact that this post has so many upvotes. It makes me think that people reading and upvoting on this site have no idea of technology.