I had Beeper. It was a cool concept but also underscored my issue with today's chat platforms. For WhatsApp, Beeper needs to have an active session token on th

I had Beeper. It was a cool concept but also underscored my issue with today's chat platforms. For WhatsApp, Beeper needs to have an active session token on their servers that you approve via QR code. This is needed because WhatsApp doesn't have a public API and the only way they can grab messages is by scraping web.whatsapp.com. It's very similar to the approach that Spark (iOS Mail App) takes for connecting to Gmail (they hold refresh tokens server side). Will someone from Spark or Beeper read your messages on the sly? Probably not. But if their servers get compromised, someone else might, and that's a problem! In the Old Days, everything was username/password Basic Auth, and all of the chat platforms exposed some kind of an API. No need for an intermediate server to hold tokens on your behalf.