16 ms·

Why is Facebook/WhatsApp doing the tether to the phone crap? I have a few seniors in the family who have no need of a cellphone (stay at home most of the time).

by tostitos1979 10y ago

Why is Facebook/WhatsApp doing the tether to the phone crap? I have a few seniors in the family who have no need of a cellphone (stay at home most of the time). Everyone else in the family uses WhatsApp and these poor people are left out of the look. It is completely stupid as far as I can see. What is the phone requirement buying them?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
shliachtx 10y ago
Not an excuse, but: A) WhatsApp is a true messaging app. Once the messages are delivered, they are deleted from the server, so you need a primary device that stores the messages. B) It currently uses a phone number as identification, in order to create a true desktop app you would need another method (unless you use a landline or dumbphone phone number for desktop as well).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cft 10y ago
  Messages are not deleted from the server. They are probably stored there in the encryped form. When I open the web version of WhatsApp, same images and the message history that i have on my phone get downloaded there. I highly doubt that they rely on my phone as the only master storage of that data and upload all images into the web version from it?
  - ars 10y ago
    Actually yes, that is exactly what they do: Download everything from the phone.
    - cft 10y ago
      Including 2MB images in the conversation? Has someone verified this by looking at the traffic?
      - nindalf 10y ago
        I can't answer that question but I can say that images shared with whatsapp are compressed to < 100kb
        cft 10y ago
        That's not true: I just looked in my WhatsApp gallery, the first image I opened was 525KB. At <100KB, any screenshot of text would show visible compression distortion around the letter edges, which they do not.
      - Spare_account 10y ago
        My experience of WhatsApp Web has been that the images do not auto-load (Chrome on Windows 10 and Windows 7). A heavily compressed thumbnail is loaded and I have to manually click each image that I want to view. I haven't analysed any traffic and I'm not a developer but my layman's guess would be that the WhatsApp mobile app has a pre-prepared Zip file (or some other compressed container) with the 20 most recent messages from each chat plus these compressed image thumbnails and the Web Client pulls that data from the phone upon initialising. I doubt it is a big data transfer.
        cft 10y ago
        Actually, the "latest" images (whatever it means) auto-load. Only when you go up in the history you have to click to load.
      - ergl 10y ago
        Images and videos are stored on their server for a fixed amount of time, and deleted afterwards. (So you just send an url and the client transforms it into a thumbnail). You can test this by trying to download an image for the first time after a few weeks, it will tell you that the image is no longer available, and you should ask the other recipient to send it again.
  - fastball 10y ago
    In order to use Whatsapp Web, your computer/tablet and your phone need to be connected to the same wifi network. That makes it easy to send all the data necessary from your phone to your computer in the blink of an eye, because intranet wifi speeds are very fast. On my iPhone, backups can be stored, but through iCloud, not on Whatsapp servers.
andreasklinger 10y ago
i will make a wild guess and assume it has to do w/ legacy in their internal system most likely their internal system can only think in telephone numbers or something like that
- cheez 10y ago
  WhatsApp was bought for $19 billion. You could probably pay $1 billion and get a couple of different systems that worked well enough to replace WhatsApp.
  - mst 10y ago
    Having read the engineering posts about their core systems I think you're being wildly optimistic in the same way as people who think "writing a general CMS can't be that hard, I'll just write my own" are.
    - jdavis703 10y ago
      You could build 17.2 WhatsApps for $1 billion, assuming that it took nothing more and nothing less than the $58 million in funding they raised: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp#/entity.
      - cheez 10y ago
        Yup, that's why I said a couple. You could afford 17, but only 2 of those would be suitable.
    - charlesdm 10y ago
      The $19 billion paid wasn't for their amazingly well engineered system, it was for their massive user base.
kilroy123 10y ago
I REALLY wish they would stop the tethering. It's pretty flakey a lot of the time. I use the webapp probably 80% of the time. Sometimes it just stops working, in the middle of a convo. Very frustrating.
ignoramous 10y ago
Remember that there is no sign up, and that your mobile (phone number once registered via SMS OTP) is the only client their servers can trust. Imagine a scenario where you were to get rid of the phone number and had sessions open on the desktop and the web. WhatsApp servers have no way of knowing where the phone number went or if it will be online ever again or if you continue to own the phone number, or someone else owns it. They need to route the msgs through that phone/number combination all the time, because it's the single source of truth. Its security and privacy that's preventing them from providing the feature you're asking for. If they detach individual user's identity from a phone number, may be then they can be a true cross platform (web, phone, desktop) messaging app.
- tostitos1979 10y ago
  This doesn't make a whole lot of sense because people give up their phone numbers from time to time. I did this myself. My understanding is that someone who claims my number cannot access my past data. But if it is "stateless" then a phone number doesn't have to be the only identifier. They can also use email. Heck .. here is an algorithm ... use phone number 555XXXXXXX .. take a person's email address and hash it to XXXXXXX. Done!
  - mattlutze 10y ago
    I guess if the point is for them not to store your messages on their servers once those messages have been delivered, how is WhatsApp to know whether to send a message to the session logged in from your phone, or to the desktop app with a different session, or to your work computer where you forgot to log out? Being able to sync across all your devices requires they start storing all of your communications centrally, which defeats the whole information security model.
    - jsudhams 10y ago
      Can't it be device to device , once you get to new device you mark that device as add and as soon as u login it can sync. But i found whatsapp is next to mp3 in my and my friends phone so it is not easy from bandwidth perspective
tszming 10y ago
This is what Facebook Messenger is designed for, they don't necessarily need to compete with each other.
- aadilmfarooqui 10y ago
  I agree. The actual usage with what they have captured the market is free texting and moving forward now they have voice messages too. So they don't really need a desktop app. Simply if one has to use it on PC, WhatsApp Web is a great feature and it does exist for the single session only.
pradex 10y ago
I used whatsapp for about an year on Bluestacks desktop app where whatsapp (without once asking for an otp confirmation apart from when I registered to start with) worked smoothly. Also my phone was never connected to internet but I had it active on a cheap phone. So in case you need seniors to come online via their desktop buy a cheapest possible phone and install bluestacks or any similar app on desktop.
746F7475 10y ago
You can get smart phones for like $20 and if they are not used for anything the service costs are like $5/mo
- nonterrorist 10y ago
  Unless you live in Canada.
  - notatoad 10y ago
    Check out 7-11, they had some good deals on low-usage phones last time I needed one.
Cakez0r 10y ago
I believe it's because your phone contains the private key needed to decrypt your messages.
nitin_flanker 10y ago
You can use bluestack android emulator or something similar to run whatsapp on desktop. You need a phone number just to create an account first, you can turn it off after that.
ddeck 10y ago
It's required because your phone is where your messages are stored. Whatsapp don't retain messages/media after they've been delivered to your phone, which is a compelling privacy feature for many. It's also what allows them to serve such an enormous user base with limited hardware. Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TneLO5TdW_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TneLO5TdW_M Slides: http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394350183453526efsf2014whatsappscaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394350183... There's likely no technical reason why you couldn't use a pc instead of a phone for users that want to use the pc as the primary client (with the phone optionally accessing the DB on the pc in the same way that the desktop client does for the phone). Perhaps they've decided that this is a small and declining market. Edit: Slides for second talk http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/rick-reed-600-m-unsuspecting-freebsd-users http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/rick-reed-600-m-unsuspec... 440k connections/sec, 1.1 million msgs/sec, 1 billion images/day, and that was in 2014...
- uola 10y ago
  "Perhaps they've decided that this is a small and declining market." For consumers (and facebook is a consumer company) it's all about who owns mobile (and can also compete with facebook). They want desktop to just be enough of a feature to be more appealing than other platforms, but not enough that it detracts from mobile.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  > There's likely no technical reason why you couldn't use a pc instead of a phone […] Any personal computer built in the last five years can do anything a smartphone or tablet can in terms of processing power and connectivity. A smartphone is a computer with hardware that enables it to use cell phone networks and make calls. My inner cynic strongly suspects that Facebook and other similar corporations really like the control they have on the overall user experience on the two major mobile operating systems; i.e., eyeballs on a smartphone or tablet are worth more than those on a general purpose computing device. Too much freedom on a personal computer; with browsers that feature all kind of privacy enhancing add-ons such as ad-blockers and tracker-blockers. Much harder to monetize.
max_ 10y ago
From personal experience, I cannot agree more. These editions are completely useless. If the Whatsapp team actually tracked the rate of user engagement with these Desktop/Web editions & compared this to the Smartphone/Tablet apps. They would agree with you.
- corin_ 10y ago
  It's quite a leap to go from your personal anecdotal experience to assuming that the data of hundreds of millions of people must be the same as your experience and was just ignored.
  - max_ 10y ago
    I think you misunderstood me. I was talking about MY case. Not "hundreds of millions of people"
    - corin_ 10y ago
      "If the Whatsapp team actually tracked the rate of user engagement with these Desktop/Web editions & compared this to the Smartphone/Tablet apps. They would agree with you." Surely you are talking about them tracking the rate of user engagement across their userbase, not just the data of you alone?
      - max_ 10y ago
        ok. u got me.
tehrei 10y ago
And this is why I use Discord. The only still sane option. It's a shame you can't use multiple accounts on the phone natively, but there are tools for that.
kome 10y ago
Switch to Telegram (https://www.telegram.org/ https://www.telegram.org/). You need a cellphone to activate it, but then you can use it on desktop without problems.
fastball 10y ago
How is facebook "tethering" to phones? You can send messages to all of your facebook friends through facebook.com on any device, as you always could.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

shliachtx 10y ago

Not an excuse, but: A) WhatsApp is a true messaging app. Once the messages are delivered, they are deleted from the server, so you need a primary device that stores the messages. B) It currently uses a phone number as identification, in order to create a true desktop app you would need another method (unless you use a landline or dumbphone phone number for desktop as well).

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cft 10y ago
Messages are not deleted from the server. They are probably stored there in the encryped form. When I open the web version of WhatsApp, same images and the message history that i have on my phone get downloaded there. I highly doubt that they rely on my phone as the only master storage of that data and upload all images into the web version from it?
- ars 10y ago
  Actually yes, that is exactly what they do: Download everything from the phone.
  - cft 10y ago
    Including 2MB images in the conversation? Has someone verified this by looking at the traffic?
    - nindalf 10y ago
      I can't answer that question but I can say that images shared with whatsapp are compressed to < 100kb
      - cft 10y ago
        That's not true: I just looked in my WhatsApp gallery, the first image I opened was 525KB. At <100KB, any screenshot of text would show visible compression distortion around the letter edges, which they do not.
    - Spare_account 10y ago
      My experience of WhatsApp Web has been that the images do not auto-load (Chrome on Windows 10 and Windows 7). A heavily compressed thumbnail is loaded and I have to manually click each image that I want to view. I haven't analysed any traffic and I'm not a developer but my layman's guess would be that the WhatsApp mobile app has a pre-prepared Zip file (or some other compressed container) with the 20 most recent messages from each chat plus these compressed image thumbnails and the Web Client pulls that data from the phone upon initialising. I doubt it is a big data transfer.
      - cft 10y ago
        Actually, the "latest" images (whatever it means) auto-load. Only when you go up in the history you have to click to load.
    - ergl 10y ago
      Images and videos are stored on their server for a fixed amount of time, and deleted afterwards. (So you just send an url and the client transforms it into a thumbnail). You can test this by trying to download an image for the first time after a few weeks, it will tell you that the image is no longer available, and you should ask the other recipient to send it again.
- fastball 10y ago
  In order to use Whatsapp Web, your computer/tablet and your phone need to be connected to the same wifi network. That makes it easy to send all the data necessary from your phone to your computer in the blink of an eye, because intranet wifi speeds are very fast. On my iPhone, backups can be stored, but through iCloud, not on Whatsapp servers.

andreasklinger 10y ago

i will make a wild guess and assume it has to do w/ legacy in their internal system most likely their internal system can only think in telephone numbers or something like that

cheez 10y ago
WhatsApp was bought for $19 billion. You could probably pay $1 billion and get a couple of different systems that worked well enough to replace WhatsApp.
- mst 10y ago
  Having read the engineering posts about their core systems I think you're being wildly optimistic in the same way as people who think "writing a general CMS can't be that hard, I'll just write my own" are.
  - jdavis703 10y ago
    You could build 17.2 WhatsApps for $1 billion, assuming that it took nothing more and nothing less than the $58 million in funding they raised: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp#/entity.
    - cheez 10y ago
      Yup, that's why I said a couple. You could afford 17, but only 2 of those would be suitable.
  - charlesdm 10y ago
    The $19 billion paid wasn't for their amazingly well engineered system, it was for their massive user base.

kilroy123 10y ago

I REALLY wish they would stop the tethering. It's pretty flakey a lot of the time. I use the webapp probably 80% of the time. Sometimes it just stops working, in the middle of a convo. Very frustrating.

ignoramous 10y ago

Remember that there is no sign up, and that your mobile (phone number once registered via SMS OTP) is the only client their servers can trust. Imagine a scenario where you were to get rid of the phone number and had sessions open on the desktop and the web. WhatsApp servers have no way of knowing where the phone number went or if it will be online ever again or if you continue to own the phone number, or someone else owns it. They need to route the msgs through that phone/number combination all the time, because it's the single source of truth. Its security and privacy that's preventing them from providing the feature you're asking for. If they detach individual user's identity from a phone number, may be then they can be a true cross platform (web, phone, desktop) messaging app.

tostitos1979 10y ago
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense because people give up their phone numbers from time to time. I did this myself. My understanding is that someone who claims my number cannot access my past data. But if it is "stateless" then a phone number doesn't have to be the only identifier. They can also use email. Heck .. here is an algorithm ... use phone number 555XXXXXXX .. take a person's email address and hash it to XXXXXXX. Done!
- mattlutze 10y ago
  I guess if the point is for them not to store your messages on their servers once those messages have been delivered, how is WhatsApp to know whether to send a message to the session logged in from your phone, or to the desktop app with a different session, or to your work computer where you forgot to log out? Being able to sync across all your devices requires they start storing all of your communications centrally, which defeats the whole information security model.
  - jsudhams 10y ago
    Can't it be device to device , once you get to new device you mark that device as add and as soon as u login it can sync. But i found whatsapp is next to mp3 in my and my friends phone so it is not easy from bandwidth perspective

tszming 10y ago

This is what Facebook Messenger is designed for, they don't necessarily need to compete with each other.

aadilmfarooqui 10y ago
I agree. The actual usage with what they have captured the market is free texting and moving forward now they have voice messages too. So they don't really need a desktop app. Simply if one has to use it on PC, WhatsApp Web is a great feature and it does exist for the single session only.

pradex 10y ago

I used whatsapp for about an year on Bluestacks desktop app where whatsapp (without once asking for an otp confirmation apart from when I registered to start with) worked smoothly. Also my phone was never connected to internet but I had it active on a cheap phone. So in case you need seniors to come online via their desktop buy a cheapest possible phone and install bluestacks or any similar app on desktop.

746F7475 10y ago

You can get smart phones for like $20 and if they are not used for anything the service costs are like $5/mo

nonterrorist 10y ago
Unless you live in Canada.
- notatoad 10y ago
  Check out 7-11, they had some good deals on low-usage phones last time I needed one.

Cakez0r 10y ago

I believe it's because your phone contains the private key needed to decrypt your messages.

nitin_flanker 10y ago

You can use bluestack android emulator or something similar to run whatsapp on desktop. You need a phone number just to create an account first, you can turn it off after that.

ddeck 10y ago

It's required because your phone is where your messages are stored. Whatsapp don't retain messages/media after they've been delivered to your phone, which is a compelling privacy feature for many. It's also what allows them to serve such an enormous user base with limited hardware. Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TneLO5TdW_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TneLO5TdW_M Slides: http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394350183453526efsf2014whatsappscaling.pdf http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394350183... There's likely no technical reason why you couldn't use a pc instead of a phone for users that want to use the pc as the primary client (with the phone optionally accessing the DB on the pc in the same way that the desktop client does for the phone). Perhaps they've decided that this is a small and declining market. Edit: Slides for second talk http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/rick-reed-600-m-unsuspecting-freebsd-users http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/rick-reed-600-m-unsuspec... 440k connections/sec, 1.1 million msgs/sec, 1 billion images/day, and that was in 2014...

uola 10y ago
"Perhaps they've decided that this is a small and declining market." For consumers (and facebook is a consumer company) it's all about who owns mobile (and can also compete with facebook). They want desktop to just be enough of a feature to be more appealing than other platforms, but not enough that it detracts from mobile.
Freak_NL 10y ago
> There's likely no technical reason why you couldn't use a pc instead of a phone […] Any personal computer built in the last five years can do anything a smartphone or tablet can in terms of processing power and connectivity. A smartphone is a computer with hardware that enables it to use cell phone networks and make calls. My inner cynic strongly suspects that Facebook and other similar corporations really like the control they have on the overall user experience on the two major mobile operating systems; i.e., eyeballs on a smartphone or tablet are worth more than those on a general purpose computing device. Too much freedom on a personal computer; with browsers that feature all kind of privacy enhancing add-ons such as ad-blockers and tracker-blockers. Much harder to monetize.

max_ 10y ago

From personal experience, I cannot agree more. These editions are completely useless. If the Whatsapp team actually tracked the rate of user engagement with these Desktop/Web editions & compared this to the Smartphone/Tablet apps. They would agree with you.

corin_ 10y ago
It's quite a leap to go from your personal anecdotal experience to assuming that the data of hundreds of millions of people must be the same as your experience and was just ignored.
- max_ 10y ago
  I think you misunderstood me. I was talking about MY case. Not "hundreds of millions of people"
  - corin_ 10y ago
    "If the Whatsapp team actually tracked the rate of user engagement with these Desktop/Web editions & compared this to the Smartphone/Tablet apps. They would agree with you." Surely you are talking about them tracking the rate of user engagement across their userbase, not just the data of you alone?
    - max_ 10y ago
      ok. u got me.

tehrei 10y ago

And this is why I use Discord. The only still sane option. It's a shame you can't use multiple accounts on the phone natively, but there are tools for that.

kome 10y ago

Switch to Telegram (https://www.telegram.org/ https://www.telegram.org/). You need a cellphone to activate it, but then you can use it on desktop without problems.

fastball 10y ago

How is facebook "tethering" to phones? You can send messages to all of your facebook friends through facebook.com on any device, as you always could.