alt Hacker NewsEven 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.
Replies
blell • yesterday at 9:13 PM
Any company can ask for interoperatibility with whatsapp. None of them are, because it's obviously against their interests.
The DMA will change nothing in this regard because the "many apps" approach is the most beneficial to users.
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nottorp • yesterday at 9:51 PM
Well they lost me at waitlist.
Correct! This is just Meta doing malicious compliance by being "compatible" with companies with no actual product, three-months old waitlist, no actual users within the EU, and nobody to push back on WhatsApp's definition of interoperability. Then when some real product tries to actually become interoperable down-the-line, Meta's gonna be like "well these two did it just fine according to this backwards implementation, why can't you?"
They're both b2b products that are gonna try to find their first users by pitching the idea that you can use their products to spam WhatsApp users.
Haiket doesn't even try to hide its connection to Meta. All you have to do is to go to their website, click on press, and see in the only press release they've ever posted that its CEO holds patents in use by Meta. Here, let me save you a click: https://haiket.com/press/release-nov11.html
> Alex holds over 10 patents in voice and communication technologies, assigned to and used by Google and Facebook.