> With the new WhatsApp interface mandated by the DMA, any BirdyChat user in the EEA will be able to start a chat with any WhatsApp user in the region simply by knowing their phone number.
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.
The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common.
I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.
The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.
Whatsapp is more popular in the US than you'd think. Probably due to a large immigrant population. I'm in several groups that use the channels feature to organize things like soccer, game nights etc. Most people with family abroad use Whatsapp, and that's a huge portion of the US.
I belong to two Toastmasters groups. One is majority non-immigrant American/caucasian, one is majority immigrant (from India, Pakistan, etc). The first one does club communication primarily via email. The second does club communication exclusively thru WhatsApp.
It's an interesting divide.
I do have some Caucasian friends who use WhatsApp. One stopped using it when FB purchased it, which I can respect. Most people I know in the states though just use iMessage or signal.
Here in EU even the 5 €/month phone plans have unlimited SMS. As soon as you want to talk to someone without Whatsapp, you need to figure out which other apps they're on. Completely useless compared to SMS
Have you considered that the EU isn't one country?
It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically download and appear immediately, due to bandwidth and resource constraints.
In France, I'm "charged" for MMS, too. But that's actually considered "data", so it's deducted from the "internet" envelope which is quite generous (at least for my needs: I have multiple dozens of GB for under 10 € a month, of which I only ever went above 10 when backing up photos during a vacation with no wifi).
Yes, but there are also plenty of countries where mobile data or even smartphones aren't nearly as universal as they might be in the places where most people use whatsapp. There, people use mostly SMS and phone calls. Whatsapp and the like are the thing you use when SMS/calls would be too expensive, so international.
Both of these exist, as do middle grounds between them.
I'm in only one WhatsApp group with someone local, everyone else in my chats is from abroad. Yet I'm from a country with dirt cheap data and nearly universal smartphone ownership. People just don't use WA here for whatever reason. But drive an hour across the border and suddenly everyone is on WhatsApp.
depends where; in France you can get unlimited SMS/MMS/calls, plus 350Go of data, for 20€/month [0]. it's surprising the market hasn't developed likewise in other (European) countries; I (genuinely) wonder why − perhaps legal issues of some sort?
edit: okay, sending MMS isn't always free, depends on the countries[1]. still free for USA, Europe, Canada, etc.
I think it’s more historical at this point. 20 years ago SMS was expensive in Europe as we had cheap plans and expensive calls/texts vs US which had expensive plans but free calls/texts. That made things like WhatsApp take off in Europe while Americans would just SMS.
(Although most Americans have iPhones so just transparently avoid SMS for most of their conversations.)
There is no in the EU here. I had unlimited SMS in a sub 20€ plan more than a decade ago in France. I now have unlimited sms, unlimited calls and unlimited data in a sub 15€ plan.
I still only use WhatsApp because it’s a lot better than sms.
All the B2C services I work with are sending SMS to my phone. Not RCS, not iMessage: they are sending SMS messages.
All the MFA providers, such as Twilio and Okta, are sending SMS.
All the political campaign spammers are sending SMS.
All the reminders for appointments and bills are sending SMS.
All the notifications for apps where Push isn't good enough: they're sending SMS.
If user-to-user communication is using iMessage then that is fine. I have noticed that only about 2 of my human contacts use RCS, and at least 2 of them are using iPhones and not Androids for it. So that's some anecdata for ya!
It all depends on age group in my experience. My friends all a bit older than me prefer Messenger for everything. My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. I think my parents and their generation use iMessage, but I use WhatsApp with them. My generation used to use snapchat a lot, I think, but I never got on that boat.
That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over discord.
Given its popularity among gamers of all nationalities, I wonder where discord stacks up in relation to the EU's DMA?
Discord is popping up as shadow IT in some places. Because of all the server admin stuff (bot APIs, Github bots, pretty advanced RBAC etc), it's basically "Slack but for free, and without the annoying SSO."
That sounds like my personal hell lol. Slack for free without the SSO, sure, but also Slack with constant annoying Nitro upsells and flashy gamer bullshit.
(I just really don't like Discord and I'm bitter that it's what my guild de facto has to use because it's what gamers have standardized on.)
Being pseudonymous doesn't prevent you from using it to contact people you actually know offline. I used Steam to talk with my group members about a project in college a couple times. Other times I used Google chat/talk/whatever it was called at the time (embedded in the browser inbox). I had a flip phone at the time, so pretty much anything I could use on desktop was easier.
I just mean I've never thought to put it in the same category as iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Like if the EU is going to regulate messaging apps, I wouldn't have thought to lump Discord or Steam chat in there with those other ones. But, honestly, why shouldn't they?
Yeah I hate SMS. I don't want my carrier to be involved in the content of my communications. Also I normally use the computer when at home, no point using a tiny mobile device obviously.
I don't use Google or Apple accounts either so RCS is out too. WhatsApp is meta now unfortunately but for historical reasons there's no avoiding it here.
I use WhatsApp and Telegram pretty much exclusively (telegram more for group chats)
Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps, this way we can all communicate together. :hugs: Until then, let's keep chatting on $US_APP so we can debate on how we're gonna achieve that switch.
Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.
The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).
I guess if you count "silently blackholed by the other server with no recourse" an acceptable result then Apple / Meta can offer you that kind of interop too.
Here's EU telling Microsoft how to conduct business globally, back in 2004 - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/ms-s... - 'help rivals connect their products to the Windows operating system.' does not mean 'EU rivals', but any 'rivals', outside of the EU as well.
'Intel v Commission (C-413/14 P, 2017)' is another case where EU Antitrust explicitly punished global conduct outside of the EU.
Right now, with exception of antitrust, EU laws only incidentally affect global conduct, e.g. once a business is compliant with GDPR, it's often too costly to restrict compliance just to the EU.
Nothing stops that from changing. EU absolutely can make a law that obliges e.g. chat app providers to either apply EU privacy standards globally or face bans/fines/seizure of their EU operations.
A probable implementation is that you bootstrap the initial key exchange using web PKI (if you want to talk to Alice@example.com then your client makes a TLS connection to example.com and asks for Alice's public key) and thereafter you use something like the Signal ratchet thing.
There's one. It's Signal. I keep telling people to use it and they keep not, because people are less likely to do things if they've been told they should do them.
To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.
I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
Signal is so much worse than WhatsApp from a UX perspective. Backup sync forces you to allow background permissions (WhatsApp doesn't), you have to set and get nagged to enter a PIN every few weeks (WhatsApp doesn't), there's no transcription for audio messages (WhatsApp has that for some languages), the desktop app loses its connection if you don't open it ever few weeks (WhatsApp works fine), etc.
You are moving the goal post. But you're right: Signal's E2EE is miles better than telegram's.
I was just trying to point out my experience in getting people to switch, most of the time they have different prioirities.
You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"
If normies who don't care for things (which is most people tbh) don't decide to switch, do you, as a techie/early adopter, just turn off whatsapp and disconnect with your normie friends? You are unlikely to be important enough in the friend group to force a switch, not to mention that this needs to happen enmass for a swing in the network effect to happen.
Being implacably stubborn is underrated. People can trivially have two messaging apps on their phone, which means they can all still contact you while using WhatsApp with other people. Then they all slowly end up with Signal on their phone, at which point who needs WhatsApp at all?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Yes, you can have two messaging apps, but people will have a “main app” which is typically the one used by important people in their life (family, partner,…) and/or the one used by most people. Meanwhile, if you all use two apps, everytime you want to check up on a friend you have to check two apps.
Imagine all your friends love pizza, as do you.
Suddenly you decide sushi is better so, naturally, you tell your friends to try out sushi at the next dinner.
Assuming some of your friends are not absolutely against sushi, yes, you’ll have that sushi dinner. But what if they don’t like it that much? They will revert to pizza or accept sushi, occasionally, when they want to see you, while still prefering pizza for all other interactions.
There has to be a perceived advantage for changing habits. If few people see the benefits of Signal or other non-Whatsapp apps, they will not change their minds.
> Meanwhile, if you all use two apps, everytime you want to check up on a friend you have to check two apps.
You just have to check the one they use. Also, both of the apps would support notifications when something has happened in that app.
> But what if they don’t like it that much?
There is no real advantage of WhatsApp over Signal except that some people are already using it, and a significant privacy disadvantage. Once someone already has Signal then the advantage of WhatsApp is gone and only the disadvantage remains.
Signal trades some decreased convenience (for example in terms of backup) for some added security. Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).
If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.
I think it’s safe to say that different people have different priorities which result in different choices.
> Signal trades some decreased convenience (for example in terms of backup)
This can't be a barrier to adoption in practice because most people don't even know that it's a thing in order to consider it as a difference, and anyone who both does and cares about it from the outset would have no trouble setting up automatic backups with Signal, and then appreciate the privacy advantage.
> Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).
> If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.
There is no actual reason to use Whatsapp except for the network effect.
> Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
and only those who actually succeed being unreasonable is remembered. The other unreasonable people simply get forgotten or ignored - the vast majority.
Succeeding a small percentage of the time results in dramatically more success than having no one even try.
Also, you're promoting defeatism. If it's just you and you succeed 1% of the time, it still helps a little. If it's millions of people -- even if that's a small minority of the population -- and they each succeed 1% of the time, that's actually a lot of groups getting converted. And it's more likely to succeed the more people in each group who do it.
So the conclusion should be that everybody should do it, since that improves everybody's odds, rather than that nobody should.
You didnt calculate in the cost of failure. The success of someone being unreasonable might return good results for everyone else (but this is not known ahead of time - otherwise, it would not be considered unreasonable before the success!)
Therefore, you risk the loss resulting from a failure.
It's why you don't just use this argument to gamble or buy lottery tickets.
If it's so easy to replicate, why isn't there any other app that has replicated it?
Signal is the closest but they fall short because they prioritize privacy over features. Which is their choice to make, but it means they have ruled themselves out from going mainstream. If you're not targeting feature parity with WhatsApp then you have zero chance of supplanting it.
Telegram prioritises idk the FSB spying on your chats, that app gives me the creeps.
Signal allows you to do local chat export for backup, as opposed to WhatsApp (which only allows backup to Google account on android). That's actually my biggest complaint against WhatsApp and Viber: why don't you allow local backup, or backup to something I control?
Correction, in case you're interested: Whatsapp does (and has always done) allow local file backups. I know because they are just there on the storage:
Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/
I also know because for many years I was VERY cloud-averse so for several iterations of smartphone purchases I did migrate my chat backups between phones (plain copy-paste of files with a computer) without issues.
There are alternatives but waaaay too many already. Some will say Signal, others matrix, xmpp, jami, deltachat, olvid, simplex, briar, tox,...there is a new one every couple of months but none everbody can agree on.
The sad part is we were halfway there with XMPP 2 decades ago when both google and facebook were interoperable with it.
I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.
I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).
I didn't say Signal did not and obviously Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat. So what do you mean?
Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.
>Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat
You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.
>I guess you are from Ukraine?
Nope.
>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly
The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.
When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.
There are many unfriendly apps on that light? insta chat, messenger, slack, discord, teams? and all of those are terrible software as well (slow, high mem etc); at least telegram is fast.
anyway, the point was not to use or endorse telegram, or the garbage i mentioned, but strive for e2ee while fast and usable.
I would sign up for anything e2ee but yeah ideally open source and hosting owned by an EU company.
Telegram is fast precisely because it's backdoored by design. Forward secret messaging app with proper key management has to encrypt the message to every peer in the group. Telegram can just use single packet to server that then pushes it to everyone else. This difference will die over time as 5G and 6G take over and phones get faster by generation. Telegram will not get more safe by generation. They're only playing to get as many users to their roach motel to make it as difficult as people for people to leave.
It's not really about that but more that other countries start regulating the same way as WhatsApp and that way not all people would switch to these apps but they would have the opportunity to use it and keep talking with their friends and family
> Sounds like an easy fix. Europe just has to convince the rest of the world to ditch the 15 year old popular US apps ingrained in pop culture and with network effects, and have them switch to their own EU made apps
Are you on some funny medication or something? ROTFL.
I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.
> The regional limit makes it pretty much useless. The only reason I keep a whatsapp account is to stay in touch with my family in law and a few relatives who live in another continent.
… useless FOR YOU. not useless overall. its just that you in your limited use case cannot use it.
It's not really the "overseas" usecase that is the sticking point for many businesses.
Does your business in Spain ever need to message Brits who are there on holiday? Does your business in Greece ever have customers who drive across the border from Albania?
We live in a global world and this is super common nowadays. In my own family 2 out of 3 sibling are married with someone who was born in a different continent, one in Asia, the other in Latin America.
And we both met them here in Europe.
People are so welcoming in latin america that when you marry someone, you literally marry the whole extended family. After just a handful of years is not like my partner's aunts and cousins are strangers to me. I can contact them anytime for advice on a topic related to their work/career field and they will do so about mine.
Add to that some cousins and friends who moved overseas and I have many regular contacts that live more than 10000km away from me.
I'm not sure what they mean by "in the region", but my case is even more extreme, as pretty much the only time I'm forced to use whatsapp is when I'm travelling and need to communicate with all sorts of hosts who annoyingly expect me to have whatsapp. After returning home I always delete it.
So I am usually "in the region" with those guys, but since "region" probably means "similar phone number" it will be useless to me too.
Ukraine isn't in the EU, neither is Swicerland, Norway or, most famously, the UK. All of these are on the European continent, all of these have citizens living right near a border with an EU country and regularly having to communicate with the EU side.
It's better than nothing. If you have a different app and want to talk to your friend who uses whatsapp it's much easier to convince him to toggle a setting than to download a different app.
It's because the real solution here is to move away from this proprietary malware to protocols that are open, so that anyone can write or fork a client. (For instance, see Molly for a fully Ungoogled Signal.)
It's difficult when it comes to messengers, but reasonably easy when it comes to Google and Android, for which good alternatives exist (e.g., DuckDuck on GrapheneOS.)
> Or worse - you have a nice trademark for your business or product, and google managed to turn 91% of "URL bars" through "web standards" and unilateral control / anti-competitive practices, turn these into "Google search". You type in Anthropic and instead of seeing their homepage, you see ads for ChatGPT. 50% of Google's revenue is trademark taxation.
This is preposterous. You'd see ads for Gemini, not ChatGPT.
You can get some really hefty fines for not playing by the rules. It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe. It's not enforced hard enough against US company empires like meta and the like unfortunately, but it absolutely works.
> It's taken extremely seriously in basically every aspect of life in Europe
Yeah, like every single cookie banner out there not actually being compliant. A regulation can't be considered to be meaningfully enforced when every single storefront openly breaches it in total impunity for years.
Yeah... Ask Schrems about the hefty fines and all that pretty things bright to Europeans by the GDPR. Come on! The GDPR is at best a pretty face to a rotten nothing-burger.
Nah it’s privacy. Gotta get consent from users. Cookies, GDPR, and all. Meta has learned from their fines, and isn’t opting users automatically into features.
It's not a case of "feel-good legislation", but yeah, this reaction was to be expected. Meta and most other SaaS companies are user-hostile on purpose, not by accident, so it's predictable they'll try to fight it.
That's fair. By feel-good I meant, passing something without trying to see how this would be the reaction. Just put a tiny bit more thought into the edge cases for exploitation. Don't rush it for the moral victory, have cake and eat it too.
That is not the case here. The legislation has been drafted with all of this in mind, and will force Meta to continually improve until the feature is like it should be.
Without Trump making a huge fuss everytime US companies have to do something that can hurt their monopolies, we'd probably already be there
I would like to be opted out by default. I'm worried at least one of those new services is going to get overrun by spammers, and if I'm opted in by default they could use the gateway to whatsapp to spam everyone else.
It's a universal setting. You have to enable it per third-party app, though. You get to choose whether you want to see them listed with WhatsApp chats or in a separate folder
Just opened my Whatsapp settings and "Third-party chat requests" is on by default (From the Netherlands). Although to actually receive messages you do have to activate this feature.
WhatsApp is a bizarre name, and I think that contributes to it occupying a "lower rent" space than the others (the goofy chat background also helps). But I think most people ultimately gloss over the joke and it just becomes kind of abstract.
With BirdyChat though, it feels like you'll be confronted by its silliness in perpetuity.
I understand my agreement with WhatsApp - i read it and all. I have no agreement with that other app. I do not know what they would do with my data. Until they give me a privacy policy and i approve it, they indeed should have none of my data. Opt-in is the correct solution.
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant (that app is European and thus must care about GDPR). They do not have my permission to have/handle my private data, and GDPR does not allow WhatAspp to hand it over without my permission either... My name (which whatsapp exposes simply with my phone number) is considered PII under GDPR and
What a strange way to think about a telecommunications service. By the same logic, shouldn’t there be a privacy policy for regular old phone lines? Who knows which third parties are between you and the person on the other end!
And speaking about the other end: I have bad news about all the data you share with untrustworthy contacts on WhatsApp…
Quite practically, anyone that enables backups (which WhatsApp heavily nudges people to do) uploads a copy of all your messages and media sent to them to a cloud provider you have no privacy agreement with.
old telephone lines did not disclose info about me with merely my phone number. whataspp discloses name, picture, status
As for your second comment, updated first comment with:
I am not even sure how this is GDPR-compliant if that app is European. They do not have my permission to have my private data, and GDPR does not allow whatAspp to hand it over without my permission either...
> old telephone lines did not disclose info about me with merely my phone number.
Old telephone lines most certainly disclosed additional information about you. Who you contacted, when, how often.
Did you call that drug dealer every Tuesday evening? Looks suspicious. Did that criminal call you the day before he robbed a store not far from your home? Looks suspicious. Do you call Pakistan twice a week? Looks suspicious. Have you ever called a suicide prevention hotline? A bank other than your own? A mosque? An independent political party?
Only to who you choose to make it available to. And if you choose “everybody”, I don’t see how you can reasonably expect this to mean “everybody not using third-party software”?
I just don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation of a telecommunications tool, so yeah, I think it’s a fair change well within the norms and expectations of an instant messenger.
You should get to control how/ to whom your data is distributed, but also requiring these recipients to only use software and services of your choosing seems excessive. Platform lock-in at this point seems like the much greater harm.
I could see the case for a small indicator in the contact details that they’re using a third-party client, but anything more (green bubbles?) would be counterproductive.
Do you also wish you could only get telephone calls from people using American made handsets, and that your email client asked you before receiving emails from other email clients, and that you couldn’t get SMS’s from other smartphone manufacturers without opting in one at a time?
Being able to reject spam , regions, specific people, specific topics, all makes sense. Wanting to approve/reject the program used to make the connection is a pretty useless way to segment communications - how will you determine “questionable” clients, and what when there’s a person you want to chat with and a person you don’t both using the same client?
I actually would love a mode on my phone that blocks all calls not coming from iPhones just like I have a mode to ignore all messages not coming from iPhones. It has blocked so much spam that it is worth it.
The recipient is already using third-party code. I am using a Samsung OS, which is not from Meta, to see your messages. Do you object to this? I also have the YouTube PiP overlay layer in front of your messages.
Man there's a rising amount of people who don't understand hypotheticals.
How can you think that your comment "...I don't chose everybody?" is a valid answer to "If you chose everybody..." ?
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.