13 ms·

WhatsApp sends Cease and Desists for apps that use native Android APIs

244 points by mimerme 8y ago

robin_reala 8y ago
The legal claims seem spurious at best. The letter provides a list of infringements and claims that each of them is violated. I’ve not used the (claimed) offending apps, but from an overview understanding of how they work it seems like precisely no items from the list would be true.
- tallanvor 8y ago
  Hopefully the app creators that received those notices are in a jurisdiction with good anti-SLAPP laws. If they really are only using Android APIs and not accessing WhatsApp through any other means, the claims are clearly designed to intimidate them into removing their apps and settling rather than go through a prolonged lawsuit that Facebook can easily afford, but small developers can't.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - nmtlc 8y ago
    In the first world anti-SLAPP laws are not necessary because SLAPPs don't exist to begin with.
guessmyname 8y ago
> Can’t Talk‘s premise is simple. All it does is automatically reply to people when you aren’t around, making use of the quick reply (RemoteInput) API native to Android. […] It’s a paid application if you want to support more than SMS and calls, such as WhatsApp, Slack, and a lot more. > DirectChat is another useful application. It works just like Facebook Messenger’s chat bubbles but it supports a lot of different applications too. It feeds your chats into another window where you can then reply back as well. Its most popular usage was probably with WhatsApp. I think the "Cease and Desist" letters are being sent because these two specific apps, unless there are others not mentioned by these article, are making use of APIs that are not directly part of WhatsApp but interact with it in a kind of direct way. I wonder if the letters were sent directly to the developers or via Google Play.
- thecatspaw 8y ago
  You are right, they dont interact with whatsapp directly, but indirectly through a android API. The android API cannot be covered by the whatsapp terms (which the developers never agreed to according to the title)
  - bodas 8y ago
    I don't believe that. They never installed Whatsapp? The intersection of people who build chat accessory apps and people who have never installed Whatsapp is surely empty.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      Doesn't WhatsApp have separate terms for users and APIs? Would be weird if these were the same terms.
    - rpeden 8y ago
      I think it depends on where in the world the user is from. Where I'm located, it doesn't seem like WhatsApp is used much, or at all. I don't think I've ever met anyone in my personal or professional lives who uses it. So if I were building an app using these APIs, it probably wouldn't even occur to me to test it with WhatsApp. I'd test it with Messenger, sure, and SMS. Maybe even Hangouts, or whatever the newest Google chat app is. I don't think it's farfetched to think that someone could have received one of these notices even though they've never used WhatsApp.
pmontra 8y ago
> This letter is not a complete list of all of WhatsApp's rights you might have violated. Fortunately they added this statement because (IANAL) I believe those developers didn't perform any of the activities listed in the bullet points of the letter. However all of third party WhatsApp automation is a gray area. Everybody knows that WhatsApp doesn't welcome it (I really don't know why) and they have the money to litigate, especially because no big business will ever build anything on the top of WhatsApp without a previous explicit consent. For example a bot API. I never understood why they didn't implement one. I hoped that after the FB acquisition they would, an exact copy of the Messenger one, but they still didn't. Now that all the founders left maybe things will change but I wonder what's FB's plan. WhatsApp is bigger than Messenger in many countries and with the EU stance against data sharing between the two companies I wouldn't be surprised if the plan is to move all WhatsApp users to Messenger.
- ashraymalhotra 8y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if the plan is to move all WhatsApp users to Messenger. People use WhatsApp over messenger primarily because how "light" the app feels. It feels exactly like SMS for free, which was always the appeal of the app. Given the trend to make a Lite version of every Android app, Facebook should be prioritising WhatsApp, not planning to migrate it to Messenger. PS - Has a mass migration of community from one product to the other ever been successfully pulled off?
  - dmoy 8y ago
    Digg to Reddit? Ha. Probably not what you were asking, I assume you actually mean within the same company? Tencent did a reasonable job of migrating a lot of people to WeChat from QQ, but then again QQ is also still alive and used, so it wasn't a full/complete migration.
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    WA doesn’t require a Facebook account if FB does that they’ll end up losing quite a bit of users.
antpls 8y ago
At first, I thought WhatApps wanted to slow down automation and bots because they just don't want people to be helped in their communications (which would be weird, given their mission is to help people to communicate). However, after the recent news about spreading misinformation in India which did lead to injustices, I can see how bots may harm uninformed users more than it would help them. Shame on WhatApps for not being able to provide an official, controlled automation solution.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I don't see what any of these apps being targeted have to do with bots.
  - antpls 8y ago
    Ultimately, "Android" is about automation and integration (hence the name), and WhatsApp is fighting the spirit of the Android API.
kartan 8y ago
TLDR: Two apps are integrated with Android. WhatsApp is integrated with Android. Facebook wants the integration to stop, so they sue this other apps integrated with Android. The solution is easy. Facebook should remove the integration from WhatsApp. Problem solved. If you don't want other apps to extend your functionality, you should not integrate with other systems. The reality is that when a behemoth like Facebook tells you to do something and that they know were you live (probably literally), your company is at risk independently of how crazy the claims are. Corporations are the new big abusive government. But we can't vote them out.
- r_c_a_d 8y ago
  But we can stop using their services.
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    You and I can (and probably do), but the carrot it too sweet for the majority of users.
    - mdpopescu 8y ago
      Now do that with the government.
      - kartan 8y ago
        > Now do that with the government. It is a similar problem. You can do that with education, healthcare, transportation, security... You can have a private version of that. Probably you can't have your own military, even that in the USA is not so clear. Most people just can't afford the private version. The government version of that services is way cheaper, so you are stuck with it even if the government does not want to invest to have a good service.
Rjevski 8y ago
The affected developers should “cease and desist” by stopping further development and releasing the code as open-source. WhatsApp/Facebook will then have to send C&Ds to hundreds of potentially anonymous contributors if they want any chance of taking the open-sourced app down.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Or just removing WhatsApp support and supporting some other platforms instead. If they don't want people to find their platform convenient, no problem.
devit 8y ago
The real problem here is that after this stunt I'd like to completely stop using Whatsapp and switch to something else instead, but I can't because other people use Whatsapp and communicating with other people is essential to me. The problem is there no laws to stop whoever becomes the lucky recipient of such a network effect from doing whatever they want. Instead antitrust law needs to be expanded to consider network effect platforms like social network as monopolies on ways of interacting with their users, and restrict them from several behaviors like this one.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  It sucks. Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp is used by the vast majority of people. The holdouts (like me) consist of people who don't want to deal with smartphones (some elderly, some who deliberately avoid them because of addictive behaviour), or who own a smartphone, but don't agree with WhatsApp's terms of use (essentially paying for access with your data). Not using WhatsApp has consequences. We sometimes miss out on family events when people forget that we don't use WhatsApp. Anyone with children is basically required to use WhatsApp for communication with other parents, organising school and social events, and what have you. Refusal to do so means you ostracise your kids. So yeah, great. To participate in some parts of society WhatsApp is now a de facto requirement. A whole nation blindly agrees to whatever terms of use Facebook drafts. And when you do accept those terms, you are forced to use their client software on one of their approved operating systems. Owning a (Android or Iphone) smartphone is a hard requirement. The network effect means that alternatives never gain any traction, and the price of WhatsApp ('free') is hard to beat.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    > To participate in some parts of society WhatsApp is now a de facto requirement. A whole nation blindly agrees to whatever terms of use Facebook drafts. Same if you don't have a Facebook account. Speaking of which, WhatsApp was the defacto IM standard before it was bought by Facebook. Previously it was MSN Messenger (or whatever it is called these days. Skype?) and that was horrible as well. XMMP was at least federated, and had backwards compatibility. The advantage WhatsApp has over MSN is that the data is E2EE. There are some people who push for an alternative called Telegram, which uses home brew cryptography instead of established standards. Though if I look at the Mastodon drama (recently posted on HN, apparently from 2017) federated in practice can lead to fractured communities. Heck, you can even see that in the history of IRC (how EFnet and IRCnet got started).
fauigerzigerk 8y ago
If I understand this correctly then I think Google needs to step in here and defend users of the Android APIs. It can't be that developers are getting sued for nothing more than using these APIs as intended.
- rlpb 8y ago
  Google could add to their ToS of the Play Store that apps that try to enforce control over the use of Android APIs get penalized or removed.
anodari 8y ago
In Brazil, everyone uses Whatsapp and companies have been pressured by consumers to offer customer service through this channel. I researched and saw that there are integrated apps, but I do not know what form they are using since for all I know, the API has not yet been made available to everyone.
- gsich 8y ago
  yowsup and Android emulators
andrewaylett 8y ago
Next up: suing Google because "Wear OS" and Android Auto also uses these APIs to allow responses from the watch/car? The whole _point_ of implementing these APIs is to allow the user to reply using a different app; replies direct from the notification on the device itself are a hook to encourage developers who don't care about the rich integrations to allow that functionality anyway. And that's one of the things I really like about Android: "platform" apps like WearOS don't use private APIs, they use public APIs so other developers can build on platform features. I have seven apps installed that ask for notification access, five I've granted.
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tabs_masterrace 8y ago
Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from? Now IM has left its early adopter stage and became an integral part of everybody's life, but in doing so we became stuck with 100% proprietary WhatsApp. Not undeserved, it works very well with billions of users, and is probably the most usable IM service ever made. But it became so big and "essential", that it doesn't seem right that a large part of human communication is bound exclusively through their apps. I think in the long run there would be a real benefit to opening up their protocol.
- Sellogyro 8y ago
  > Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from? I remember the unofficial clients not being able to support the latest features, and being completely locked out as soon as a new major version of the mainline client being released.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  When was that? I always remember them being reversed engineered.
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    I remember a short time after AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc. had fallen out of favor and Google Chat used XMPP and I think even Facebook used it.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      I never had any significant use of Google Chat or Hangouts among my circle of acquaintances. Those that left ICQ and Yahoo moved into MSN messenger, followed by Skype. And now there is an uniform distribution across Whatsapp, Skype and Viber. However this is anecdote data.
- beagle3 8y ago
  AOL did their best to lock everyone out of Oscar/AIM, such as requiring a checksum of (a random part of) the .exe -- and they were the WhatsApp-equivalent-800-lbs-gorilla of the time. (And that's mostly why it didn't matter what anyone else did). In fact, the closest thing resembling an IM standard, XMPP, was chosen not on technical merit, but rather becase the IETF group set up to standardize was (essentially) sabotaged by the members each driving their own agenda -- and after 3 years with nothing to show, when the working group disbanded, Jabber -- which was mediocre, but actually had working servers and clients -- was adopted as a standard. I was tangentially involved with that process at the time, it was a shitshow; I would guess that's common for many standardization processes, but to my young and naive eyes it looked almost unbelievable.
einarfd 8y ago
I wonder what Google thinks about this. If these companies only use standard Android API's, and they get sued over that, that isn't good for Googles platform at all. A reasonable response from Google would be to change their terms for publishing to the Play store, if they don't say it already, that you aren't allowed to sue other app makers, if they only use standard API to interop with your app.
- oddevan 8y ago
  This is key, I think. I recall Apple coming to developers' defense when they were targeted for using standard APIs, and if Google wants Android to be a useful platform it will need to do the same here.
test6554 8y ago
What if the problem of auto-messaging is the potential for an infinite loop of message and auto-reply. That could cause a lot of headaches for whatsapp.
- apearson 8y ago
  I would assume they have rate limiting for all clients if it affects them that much
mnm1 8y ago
Here's an idea. When a case like this is thrown out of court, the defendant is awarded 1% of the company's revenues in perpetuity as damages. Or replace that with any decent incentive for asshole companies like FB to pull this kind of shit. There need to be serious negative consequences for abusing the court system and loading it with bullshit cases like this one. There is no agreement here between the two parties. Case dropped. The alternative is fixing our fucked up court system so that it can be used for its intended purposes by non-b/millionaires, but that's highly unlikely to ever happen.

244 points by mimerme 8y ago

The legal claims seem spurious at best. The letter provides a list of infringements and claims that each of them is violated. I’ve not used the (claimed) offending apps, but from an overview understanding of how they work it seems like precisely no items from the list would be true.

tallanvor 8y ago
Hopefully the app creators that received those notices are in a jurisdiction with good anti-SLAPP laws. If they really are only using Android APIs and not accessing WhatsApp through any other means, the claims are clearly designed to intimidate them into removing their apps and settling rather than go through a prolonged lawsuit that Facebook can easily afford, but small developers can't.
- deleted 8y ago
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- nmtlc 8y ago
  In the first world anti-SLAPP laws are not necessary because SLAPPs don't exist to begin with.

guessmyname 8y ago

> Can’t Talk‘s premise is simple. All it does is automatically reply to people when you aren’t around, making use of the quick reply (RemoteInput) API native to Android. […] It’s a paid application if you want to support more than SMS and calls, such as WhatsApp, Slack, and a lot more. > DirectChat is another useful application. It works just like Facebook Messenger’s chat bubbles but it supports a lot of different applications too. It feeds your chats into another window where you can then reply back as well. Its most popular usage was probably with WhatsApp. I think the "Cease and Desist" letters are being sent because these two specific apps, unless there are others not mentioned by these article, are making use of APIs that are not directly part of WhatsApp but interact with it in a kind of direct way. I wonder if the letters were sent directly to the developers or via Google Play.

thecatspaw 8y ago
You are right, they dont interact with whatsapp directly, but indirectly through a android API. The android API cannot be covered by the whatsapp terms (which the developers never agreed to according to the title)
- bodas 8y ago
  I don't believe that. They never installed Whatsapp? The intersection of people who build chat accessory apps and people who have never installed Whatsapp is surely empty.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    Doesn't WhatsApp have separate terms for users and APIs? Would be weird if these were the same terms.
  - rpeden 8y ago
    I think it depends on where in the world the user is from. Where I'm located, it doesn't seem like WhatsApp is used much, or at all. I don't think I've ever met anyone in my personal or professional lives who uses it. So if I were building an app using these APIs, it probably wouldn't even occur to me to test it with WhatsApp. I'd test it with Messenger, sure, and SMS. Maybe even Hangouts, or whatever the newest Google chat app is. I don't think it's farfetched to think that someone could have received one of these notices even though they've never used WhatsApp.

pmontra 8y ago

> This letter is not a complete list of all of WhatsApp's rights you might have violated. Fortunately they added this statement because (IANAL) I believe those developers didn't perform any of the activities listed in the bullet points of the letter. However all of third party WhatsApp automation is a gray area. Everybody knows that WhatsApp doesn't welcome it (I really don't know why) and they have the money to litigate, especially because no big business will ever build anything on the top of WhatsApp without a previous explicit consent. For example a bot API. I never understood why they didn't implement one. I hoped that after the FB acquisition they would, an exact copy of the Messenger one, but they still didn't. Now that all the founders left maybe things will change but I wonder what's FB's plan. WhatsApp is bigger than Messenger in many countries and with the EU stance against data sharing between the two companies I wouldn't be surprised if the plan is to move all WhatsApp users to Messenger.

ashraymalhotra 8y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if the plan is to move all WhatsApp users to Messenger. People use WhatsApp over messenger primarily because how "light" the app feels. It feels exactly like SMS for free, which was always the appeal of the app. Given the trend to make a Lite version of every Android app, Facebook should be prioritising WhatsApp, not planning to migrate it to Messenger. PS - Has a mass migration of community from one product to the other ever been successfully pulled off?
- dmoy 8y ago
  Digg to Reddit? Ha. Probably not what you were asking, I assume you actually mean within the same company? Tencent did a reasonable job of migrating a lot of people to WeChat from QQ, but then again QQ is also still alive and used, so it wasn't a full/complete migration.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  WA doesn’t require a Facebook account if FB does that they’ll end up losing quite a bit of users.

antpls 8y ago

At first, I thought WhatApps wanted to slow down automation and bots because they just don't want people to be helped in their communications (which would be weird, given their mission is to help people to communicate). However, after the recent news about spreading misinformation in India which did lead to injustices, I can see how bots may harm uninformed users more than it would help them. Shame on WhatApps for not being able to provide an official, controlled automation solution.

icebraining 8y ago
I don't see what any of these apps being targeted have to do with bots.
- antpls 8y ago
  Ultimately, "Android" is about automation and integration (hence the name), and WhatsApp is fighting the spirit of the Android API.

kartan 8y ago

TLDR: Two apps are integrated with Android. WhatsApp is integrated with Android. Facebook wants the integration to stop, so they sue this other apps integrated with Android. The solution is easy. Facebook should remove the integration from WhatsApp. Problem solved. If you don't want other apps to extend your functionality, you should not integrate with other systems. The reality is that when a behemoth like Facebook tells you to do something and that they know were you live (probably literally), your company is at risk independently of how crazy the claims are. Corporations are the new big abusive government. But we can't vote them out.

r_c_a_d 8y ago
But we can stop using their services.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  You and I can (and probably do), but the carrot it too sweet for the majority of users.
  - mdpopescu 8y ago
    Now do that with the government.
    - kartan 8y ago
      > Now do that with the government. It is a similar problem. You can do that with education, healthcare, transportation, security... You can have a private version of that. Probably you can't have your own military, even that in the USA is not so clear. Most people just can't afford the private version. The government version of that services is way cheaper, so you are stuck with it even if the government does not want to invest to have a good service.

Rjevski 8y ago

The affected developers should “cease and desist” by stopping further development and releasing the code as open-source. WhatsApp/Facebook will then have to send C&Ds to hundreds of potentially anonymous contributors if they want any chance of taking the open-sourced app down.

lucb1e 8y ago
Or just removing WhatsApp support and supporting some other platforms instead. If they don't want people to find their platform convenient, no problem.

devit 8y ago

The real problem here is that after this stunt I'd like to completely stop using Whatsapp and switch to something else instead, but I can't because other people use Whatsapp and communicating with other people is essential to me. The problem is there no laws to stop whoever becomes the lucky recipient of such a network effect from doing whatever they want. Instead antitrust law needs to be expanded to consider network effect platforms like social network as monopolies on ways of interacting with their users, and restrict them from several behaviors like this one.

Freak_NL 8y ago
It sucks. Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp is used by the vast majority of people. The holdouts (like me) consist of people who don't want to deal with smartphones (some elderly, some who deliberately avoid them because of addictive behaviour), or who own a smartphone, but don't agree with WhatsApp's terms of use (essentially paying for access with your data). Not using WhatsApp has consequences. We sometimes miss out on family events when people forget that we don't use WhatsApp. Anyone with children is basically required to use WhatsApp for communication with other parents, organising school and social events, and what have you. Refusal to do so means you ostracise your kids. So yeah, great. To participate in some parts of society WhatsApp is now a de facto requirement. A whole nation blindly agrees to whatever terms of use Facebook drafts. And when you do accept those terms, you are forced to use their client software on one of their approved operating systems. Owning a (Android or Iphone) smartphone is a hard requirement. The network effect means that alternatives never gain any traction, and the price of WhatsApp ('free') is hard to beat.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  > To participate in some parts of society WhatsApp is now a de facto requirement. A whole nation blindly agrees to whatever terms of use Facebook drafts. Same if you don't have a Facebook account. Speaking of which, WhatsApp was the defacto IM standard before it was bought by Facebook. Previously it was MSN Messenger (or whatever it is called these days. Skype?) and that was horrible as well. XMMP was at least federated, and had backwards compatibility. The advantage WhatsApp has over MSN is that the data is E2EE. There are some people who push for an alternative called Telegram, which uses home brew cryptography instead of established standards. Though if I look at the Mastodon drama (recently posted on HN, apparently from 2017) federated in practice can lead to fractured communities. Heck, you can even see that in the history of IRC (how EFnet and IRCnet got started).

fauigerzigerk 8y ago

If I understand this correctly then I think Google needs to step in here and defend users of the Android APIs. It can't be that developers are getting sued for nothing more than using these APIs as intended.

rlpb 8y ago
Google could add to their ToS of the Play Store that apps that try to enforce control over the use of Android APIs get penalized or removed.

anodari 8y ago

In Brazil, everyone uses Whatsapp and companies have been pressured by consumers to offer customer service through this channel. I researched and saw that there are integrated apps, but I do not know what form they are using since for all I know, the API has not yet been made available to everyone.

gsich 8y ago
yowsup and Android emulators

andrewaylett 8y ago

Next up: suing Google because "Wear OS" and Android Auto also uses these APIs to allow responses from the watch/car? The whole _point_ of implementing these APIs is to allow the user to reply using a different app; replies direct from the notification on the device itself are a hook to encourage developers who don't care about the rich integrations to allow that functionality anyway. And that's one of the things I really like about Android: "platform" apps like WearOS don't use private APIs, they use public APIs so other developers can build on platform features. I have seven apps installed that ask for notification access, five I've granted.

deleted 8y ago

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tabs_masterrace 8y ago

Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from? Now IM has left its early adopter stage and became an integral part of everybody's life, but in doing so we became stuck with 100% proprietary WhatsApp. Not undeserved, it works very well with billions of users, and is probably the most usable IM service ever made. But it became so big and "essential", that it doesn't seem right that a large part of human communication is bound exclusively through their apps. I think in the long run there would be a real benefit to opening up their protocol.

Sellogyro 8y ago
> Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from? I remember the unofficial clients not being able to support the latest features, and being completely locked out as soon as a new major version of the mainline client being released.
pjmlp 8y ago
When was that? I always remember them being reversed engineered.
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  I remember a short time after AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc. had fallen out of favor and Google Chat used XMPP and I think even Facebook used it.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I never had any significant use of Google Chat or Hangouts among my circle of acquaintances. Those that left ICQ and Yahoo moved into MSN messenger, followed by Skype. And now there is an uniform distribution across Whatsapp, Skype and Viber. However this is anecdote data.
beagle3 8y ago
AOL did their best to lock everyone out of Oscar/AIM, such as requiring a checksum of (a random part of) the .exe -- and they were the WhatsApp-equivalent-800-lbs-gorilla of the time. (And that's mostly why it didn't matter what anyone else did). In fact, the closest thing resembling an IM standard, XMPP, was chosen not on technical merit, but rather becase the IETF group set up to standardize was (essentially) sabotaged by the members each driving their own agenda -- and after 3 years with nothing to show, when the working group disbanded, Jabber -- which was mediocre, but actually had working servers and clients -- was adopted as a standard. I was tangentially involved with that process at the time, it was a shitshow; I would guess that's common for many standardization processes, but to my young and naive eyes it looked almost unbelievable.

einarfd 8y ago

I wonder what Google thinks about this. If these companies only use standard Android API's, and they get sued over that, that isn't good for Googles platform at all. A reasonable response from Google would be to change their terms for publishing to the Play store, if they don't say it already, that you aren't allowed to sue other app makers, if they only use standard API to interop with your app.

oddevan 8y ago
This is key, I think. I recall Apple coming to developers' defense when they were targeted for using standard APIs, and if Google wants Android to be a useful platform it will need to do the same here.

test6554 8y ago

What if the problem of auto-messaging is the potential for an infinite loop of message and auto-reply. That could cause a lot of headaches for whatsapp.

apearson 8y ago
I would assume they have rate limiting for all clients if it affects them that much

mnm1 8y ago

Here's an idea. When a case like this is thrown out of court, the defendant is awarded 1% of the company's revenues in perpetuity as damages. Or replace that with any decent incentive for asshole companies like FB to pull this kind of shit. There need to be serious negative consequences for abusing the court system and loading it with bullshit cases like this one. There is no agreement here between the two parties. Case dropped. The alternative is fixing our fucked up court system so that it can be used for its intended purposes by non-b/millionaires, but that's highly unlikely to ever happen.