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?
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
- 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.
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"
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...
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.
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...
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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
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).
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.
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 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)