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Hey, everyone, I'm the dev. First of all, thanks to @halfimmortal for posting this, I've just stumbled upon it. It's my first time on the front page ^^ I didn'

by aluxian 11y ago

Hey, everyone, I'm the dev. First of all, thanks to @halfimmortal for posting this, I've just stumbled upon it. It's my first time on the front page ^^ I didn't realise using the official logo, their colours and the name was so bad. I emailed WhatsApp to discuss it and I hope we'll come to an agreement. Whatever we get to, I'm willing to rename the app and use another domain to keep the app alive. The app is just a wrapper around web.whatsapp.com which runs on top of NW.js. What I did is make the notifications work, I added custom themes (will be available in the next release) and some minor tweaks to improve integration with the OS. The app doesn't work on iOS due to some operating system limitations. I think WhatsApp is working on it. Thanks for the support and the naming idea.

Kluny 11y ago
Can I use my own phone number and contacts list, chat with people who aren't on Whatsapp, and use this client to type my text messages from my desktop? If so I'll be happy to pay for it.
- aluxian 11y ago
  My app has the exact same functionality as https://web.whatsapp.com https://web.whatsapp.com. You can't chat with people who aren't on WhatsApp.
clamprecht 11y ago
Living in a Spanish-speaking country, I always thought the name "Qué Pasapp" would make sense. (Qué pasa translates roughly to "What's up?"). But I'm not a native Spanish speaker, so this may not sound good to native speakers.
- josu 11y ago
  I'm a native speaker and it sounds pretty bad to me. Besides, I think that most people in Spanish speaking countries don't even know what "What's up?" means.
saurik 11y ago
As someone who occasionally has to deal with this kind of thing on the other end, please understand that the way you just described e-mailing them is from a position of bad faith... you did something really really obviously wrong: you named your program after their program, and it isn't like the reason you did it was somehow unrelated... you clearly did it purposely so people would associate your product with their product, in order to give it that "official look" to it... that's why you spend so much time using their images and logos and put their name so prominently in the title; now, rather than saying "oh damn, I somehow failed to realize this was bad, I'd better change this" or even "oh shit, they caught me, maybe if I fix this quickly it won't be a big issue", you seem to have taken the position "I will keep doing this and see if I can achieve enough momentum to force them to come to an 'agreement' with me over the name", forcing them to scramble quickly to try to shut you down. Saying you are "willing to change the name" really just sounds like a stalling tactic, as yes: you need to change the name. The response you are going to get from this kind of behavior is thereby going to be much harsher than if you took a high road here, as the "ugh, someone is insisting on using our name and we are actively running into issues with people downloading this right now and trying to use it" leads not just to talking with you directly but to having them have to quickly send legal notices to domain name vendors and hosting providers to try to get the website shut down by force. This is just not OK: there are so many other ways you could have played this; you didn't, in fact, need to use the name "WhatsApp" at all, and if you really wanted to have the greatest chance of success, that's what you should have done... you should name this thing "AluxMate" or something, and then have the body text of the website talk about how you've built a beautiful desktop client for WhatsApp. This is especially true given that you seem to have also built a Facebook Messenger client: it is actually not only harming these companies when you use these brands, it is harming your own project, because what you really should be doing is giving yourself a separate identity and purpose; the new "AluxMate" brand that you build, a brand that people can come to associate with you, could even be a unified desktop client for all of these normally-browser-only messaging services, and people might start talking about how awesome AluxMate is and how everyone should use it, or asking for AluxMate support for whatever new service is the new hotness... something that--and this is a direct outcome of stealing someone else's brand identity--can't happen if people are trying to say "you should use WhatsApp for Desktop!"... people are just going to go to the website for WhatsApp to try to download that, because that's what the name "WhatsApp for Desktop" signifies :/. That also totally divorces trademarks from the situation, which means that even if they don't happen to like you building a desktop client for their service, you aren't really to blame for people using your client.

by aluxian 11y ago

Kluny 11y ago

Can I use my own phone number and contacts list, chat with people who aren't on Whatsapp, and use this client to type my text messages from my desktop? If so I'll be happy to pay for it.

aluxian 11y ago
My app has the exact same functionality as https://web.whatsapp.com https://web.whatsapp.com. You can't chat with people who aren't on WhatsApp.

clamprecht 11y ago

Living in a Spanish-speaking country, I always thought the name "Qué Pasapp" would make sense. (Qué pasa translates roughly to "What's up?"). But I'm not a native Spanish speaker, so this may not sound good to native speakers.

josu 11y ago
I'm a native speaker and it sounds pretty bad to me. Besides, I think that most people in Spanish speaking countries don't even know what "What's up?" means.

saurik 11y ago

As someone who occasionally has to deal with this kind of thing on the other end, please understand that the way you just described e-mailing them is from a position of bad faith... you did something really really obviously wrong: you named your program after their program, and it isn't like the reason you did it was somehow unrelated... you clearly did it purposely so people would associate your product with their product, in order to give it that "official look" to it... that's why you spend so much time using their images and logos and put their name so prominently in the title; now, rather than saying "oh damn, I somehow failed to realize this was bad, I'd better change this" or even "oh shit, they caught me, maybe if I fix this quickly it won't be a big issue", you seem to have taken the position "I will keep doing this and see if I can achieve enough momentum to force them to come to an 'agreement' with me over the name", forcing them to scramble quickly to try to shut you down. Saying you are "willing to change the name" really just sounds like a stalling tactic, as yes: you need to change the name. The response you are going to get from this kind of behavior is thereby going to be much harsher than if you took a high road here, as the "ugh, someone is insisting on using our name and we are actively running into issues with people downloading this right now and trying to use it" leads not just to talking with you directly but to having them have to quickly send legal notices to domain name vendors and hosting providers to try to get the website shut down by force. This is just not OK: there are so many other ways you could have played this; you didn't, in fact, need to use the name "WhatsApp" at all, and if you really wanted to have the greatest chance of success, that's what you should have done... you should name this thing "AluxMate" or something, and then have the body text of the website talk about how you've built a beautiful desktop client for WhatsApp. This is especially true given that you seem to have also built a Facebook Messenger client: it is actually not only harming these companies when you use these brands, it is harming your own project, because what you really should be doing is giving yourself a separate identity and purpose; the new "AluxMate" brand that you build, a brand that people can come to associate with you, could even be a unified desktop client for all of these normally-browser-only messaging services, and people might start talking about how awesome AluxMate is and how everyone should use it, or asking for AluxMate support for whatever new service is the new hotness... something that--and this is a direct outcome of stealing someone else's brand identity--can't happen if people are trying to say "you should use WhatsApp for Desktop!"... people are just going to go to the website for WhatsApp to try to download that, because that's what the name "WhatsApp for Desktop" signifies :/. That also totally divorces trademarks from the situation, which means that even if they don't happen to like you building a desktop client for their service, you aren't really to blame for people using your client.