WhatsApp doesn't understand the web

This web client, even in it&#x27;s current horrific form, is something I really needed.<p>Many a times I find myself working on my laptop, with the phone carelessly lying somewhere else in the room. It&#x27;s a pain to go find it when a new message arrives.<p>The bottomline is, I guess WhatsApp doesn&#x27;t need a Web Client to compete with other services. If you&#x27;ve been to India, you will realize how pervasive WhatsApp is, with or without a Web Client.<p>This is just an added convenience feature for some power users. So it is understandable that they went this route.

Closed technologies succumb. It is a lesson from history. Remember that &#x27;default&#x27; browser that had 90% of the market and now has less than 10%? Remember that über successful smartphone company that owned the market with its propietary chat&#x2F;email network? How about widely used programming languages and frameworks? Flash for cool web effects anyone? The web is open, open wins. No matter how monolithic a market leader is, if it can&#x27;t figure out how to be open and make money: it will succumb.

Of course not. It&#x27;s not federated and not standard compliant. It&#x27;s a complete shame that they use XMPP but modified it to make it non compliant on purpose. Whatsapp is just an insult the Web and an example of the Internet&#x27;s dark age mentality of walled gardens (like AOL vs Compuserve e-mail incompatibility).

&gt; Your phone needs to stay connected to the internet for our web client to work...<p>What? Is this true? I can&#x27;t think of a reason why their devs would ever need the users phone to be online.

&gt;<i>Here in Brazil WhatsApp is basically ubiquitous since its cheaper to send IM messages than to send SMS.</i><p>From this I conclude that OP has fallen for the bizarre nonsense argument I&#x27;ve heard in Brazil a lot of times when WhatsApp was gaining traction: &quot;You must use it! It&#x27;s free SMS!&quot;<p>What? No, it is not &quot;free SMS&quot;, it is internet messaging. Internet messaging has existed since... since there was internet. Yeah, it is &quot;free&quot; as long as you have unlimited internet, but if that qualifies for &quot;free SMS&quot; email was free SMS much before WhatsApp.

Standards defiance notwithstanding, the web client appears to work as advertised and will surely save many a neck and thumb from premature aging.<p>It&#x27;s interesting at this point to think about identity and authentication in WhatsApp. They&#x27;ve never had a username or password and their use of your mobile phone number as your identity seems to have been key to their success (the other factor I&#x27;d cite is good cross-platform support).<p>WhatsApp authn on mobile consists of a once-off SMS verification to confirm you are running WhatsApp on the mobile device hosting the SIM card corresponding to the phone number identity you&#x27;ve claimed for yourself. That said, I recently saw a case of someone using a temporary pre-paid SIM card while she was traveling here in South Africa yet her WhatsApp messages from that phone still appeared to come from her New Zealand number. Not sure how that passed the authn.<p>The lack of username and password, I believe, is what has led to some of the unnaturalness of the WhatsApp web app. I don&#x27;t think that their remarks of &quot;the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device -- this means all of your messages still live on your phone.&quot; reveal all of what guided their design choices. I also doubt that they &quot;don&#x27;t get the web&quot;. Instead I think they need the phone there and online because they have no username and password (or other device-independent authn) and they have thought quite carefully about protecting what got them ahead of the myriads of other perfectly functional IM apps out there in the first place.

I don&#x27;t understand why you think the biggest SMS system in the world (which it is in practice) should open its API or use non-proprietary system. Moreover you have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever on their technical infrastructure or their constraints as a business and a technology company. Making this kind of blog post, based on arguments made out of thin air, is the same as putting a redesign of Amazon on Dribbble and bitch about their current design.

Can it be a money issue? Remembering that WhatsApp is not free, the 1$ for a year of service should be how they make money (I think they did a very good job there because no one that I know remembers that). Maybe the on-line phone solution suits them technically and economically, because they don&#x27;t want to provide you with an alternative client that you might use for free. As they say this is simply and extension of the phone client.

I would be interested to understand more about why WhatsApp made some of those decisions. The requirement to keep your phone connected to the Internet seems strange, perhaps it&#x27;s using some encryption key that never leaves the device? Why do they need the Chrome-only filesystem API so much? Why has iOS been left out?

If all of this is true, its worse then I expected and I did not expect much. Why do all these companys wage a war against third party, even from a buissness perspective I don&#x27;t get it. It creates innovation that you can copy for the offical app and its a perfect to test new features.

Hrmm I really like the web client. It&#x27;s not great (image viewer is really small) but serves my needs perfectly

One more update to your article: several mobiles can&#x27;t use that, because it seens de animation on the QR Code Scan screen is not responsive. My phone is a example, I just can&#x27;t scan the QR Code:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/QTmTdJ4.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;QTmTdJ4.jpg</a>

The linked article could have been titled &quot;andre garzia does not understand that mobile messaging is not the web&quot; jajaja ;)<p>I am not going to comment on the chrome only and non standard API complaints.<p>The key insight behind modern mobile messaging that allows them to scale cheaply is that for most consumers the phone is persistent enough that the server does not need to store messages. Ask a 19 year old if they need their old whatsapp messages. Most will say no. In fact, many proactively delete them. Turning a mobile messaging into a CPU and bandwidth only problem is a clever hack instead of it also being a disk and indexing problem.<p>This is hard thing for a lot of us to understand because we come from a world where our business has message retention and surveillance requirements. We want to run quantized self and sentiment analysis reports for the last 10 years. But most people either don&#x27;t know that might even want that.<p>The other key insight is that knowing the user&#x27;s identity can be more important than the user themselves.

Wasn&#x27;t Whatsapp&#x27;s success attributed to their policy of inclusion (all major mobile platform&#x2F;devices). This seems like coming from a different company altogether.

So? Why should WhatsApp &quot;understand&quot; the web?

Author here, will monitor this thread waiting for feedback and general comments.

The web doesn&#x27;t understand WhatsApp.

It also works in Opera, fyi.

Yes. Thank you.

I&#x27;ve been using XMPP on my phone just fine. Why do I need WhatsApp which is not open? It offers me nothing new other than having to verify my phone number. But I can just use Google Voice if I wanted to message someone who knows my phone number. If I&#x27;m talking with someone in India there is no reason why I shouldn&#x27;t just use XMPP.

Apple has ushered in a new era in which a high level of centralized control is considered acceptable to consumers.<p>WhatsApp is obviously trying to keep total control, like apple.<p>This doesn&#x27;t explain all of their failings here. For example, I&#x27;m sure they will eventually find ways to address their control issues and still be usable in other browsers.<p>They might never do a web interface that runs in iOS, due to apple&#x27;s own controling approach. Of course there is still the whatsapp iOS app.