BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

I'm pretty resentful that people in the US are stuck using worse/less featureful versions of products from US companies, while the government in Europe can get these kinds of concessions for their people. If a company is legally obligated to offer a feature to people in other parts of the world, they should be forced to offer it at back home in the US as well, since we can't be bothered otherwise to pass any of these nice laws for ourselves. See also: choice in app stores

That name isn't that great ...

WhatsApp is not a great name either, but catchy and somewhat simple.

BirdyPo.. I mean BirdyChat sounds like when doves cry. But not as catchy.

Also, I am all in favour of Europeans becoming less dependent on the USA (yet-another-ICE-killing incident today, with video footage contradicting the claims made by the current government - again), but there is kind of ... a weak decision-making process here. Lobbyists sell to Europeans that Amazon data servers in Europe, now comply with european laws. Well, those are still external companies that will hand over data from europeans, so that is not a solution. Why do some media try to insinuate otherwise? Who owns and controls all these media?

> 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.

While not a commercial offering, which is what this is saying in reality - closed source, commercial alternative with (limited) interoperability, I've been running my own chat server for a while now with (limited) interoperability with both Whatsapp and Messenger.

I suspect a good number of people here don't care for any of this - FOSS, chat, voice, and video is where it's at. Interoperability for those last two don't exist yet AFAIK, and they're truly game-changers. Will that change? Does the DMA mention anything other than chat? Perhaps someone could enlighten me.

This five-month-old comment suggests that birdychat uses telegram, pivot maybe?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736050

I was a big fan of pidgin, but this premise makes me feel iffy.

Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own. Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day.

Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion

This is pretty amazing, but I wish they picked a better name for it. I have a feeling that a good amount of people will dismiss it just because of the name.

Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.

Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.

When a smaller network tries to be interoperable with a larger network, the larger network almost always eats up the smaller one. This is how XMPP was killed by Gtalk, if any of you are old enough to remember.

As a European, I would like to know in _which_ European country you're based. I think I know all of them, people from abroad might not. Saying "Made in Europe" is too general for my European liking. ;)

Exciting news! Can't wait for iMessage to open up too. Any idea if this (or other future messengers) will work outside of Europe too or does WhatsApp use some kind of geofencing, like Apple, to prevent non-EU citizens from enjoying the same rights too?

Does this mandate allow me to use a. 3rd party Teams, Google Chat and Slack client?

I suspect the answer is no, but why?

I must protest that this kind of announcement belies the stupidity of proprietary chat protocols.

Remember when IRC was king, and basically, anyone could write an IRC client? Anyone could write a MUD client, or even a Telnet client. Those are open protocols.

When Pidgin came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for me. In the early 90s I had multiple IM accounts (starting with ICQ!) and unifying them, especially under a Linux client, was a dream come true.

But of course, AIM purported to use Oscar at the time, but they really hated F/OSS and 3rd-party clients, and so did the other proprietary guys, so it became cat-and-mouse to keep the client compatible while the servers always tried to break their functionality.

Now this dumb announcement comes out that a 3rd party has (apparently legally) established interop with a Meta property with (I am guessing) a completely proprietary, undocumented, secret protocol underneath.

I am not impressed. I am McKayla Maroney unimpressed.

I want open protocols and I want client devs who are free to produce clients in freeform, as long as they can follow the protocol specs. Now we have email clients who speak SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, including the "secured, encrypted" versions of those protocols. We should ask for nothing less when it comes to other communications.

Don't they have a desktop app? The WhatsApp desktop app is heavy and annoying. Would love to use something else.

Hope the new Whatsapp interface won't be abused for spam . As Whatsapp already has spam issues . Will it run through meta's anti-spam filtering ?

This means nothing good, Meta and its products are a privacy nightmare, with WhatsApp having major market share outside of the U.S.

People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available.

No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.

How does this work with end to end encryption? Just out of curiosity

This is really amazing. I hope some regulation like DMA comes to India as well.

Does WhatsApp charge money for this? If not, why would a business use their API? They could simply create an app to directly talk to their customers, or am I missing something?

Would that work outside europe?

Closed, iOS only, invite only. Thanks.

Warning! Badly broken user interface, I wouldn't trust these programmers to get the end-to-end encryption right.

On the second screen of the app there is already an infuriating bug: they ask to give your work email because than you go hire in priority on their invite-only waiting list. So you type in your email again and again and again, alternating between all your emails, but you keep returning to the form asking for your work email. You check those emails to see if they send you something to activate your account but nothing. Exasperated you try the only other button, sign up with private email instead. Guess that works, because you leave the infinite loop. But than zilch, nada, nothing.

Don't these script-kiddies use their own app?

I wonder if this will force Apple to open up iMessage.

This is app/company from Latvia, as I understand.

[dead]

I can vibecode this in an hour.