[tostitos1979]

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?

[ddeck]

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=TneLO5TdW_M

Slides:

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-unsuspec...

440k connections/sec, 1.1 million msgs/sec, 1 billion images/day, and that was in 2014...

[Freak_NL]

> 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.

[kome]

You are totally right! That's the obvious answer. On desktop you have too much freedom.

[rhaps0dy]

I'm going to assume this is sarcasm and upvote.

[executesorder66]

> It's required because your phone is where your messages are stored.

So are you saying that a desktop PC's hard drive can't handle storage of some text messages but a phone can?

[xomateix]

Of course, he is not saying that, he is just explaining how whatsapp is actually storing the messages.

[yxlx]

No, he's saying that in order for the messages to be available, they have to be stored locally and since most people need access to the messages from their phones, it makes sense to do it this way to ensure that all messages are stored on the phone, instead of users ending up with some messages on their phones and some on their PCs.

[Longhanks]

Neither does iMessage store messages on servers, and yet I receive iMessages on every device I signed on.

[kccqzy]

But you can't retrieve historical iMessages on a new device.

[hudell]

I'm not really asking for that feature. If I could send and receive messages on the computer without having to open the smartphone app every five minutes for it to restore the connection, I would be happy already;

[uola]

"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.

[ignoramous]

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]

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!

[ucaetano]

Most people in the world don't (or barely) use email, specially in EMs. Also, you can access you email from many different places, you (usually) can't receive an SMS on the same number from many different places.

Another advantage of using phone numbers is that people actually have other people's numbers in their phone address books, which whatsapp uses. Very few people have their friends' email addresses on their contacts.

[mattlutze]

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]

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

[JonnyaiR]

This way, you might not have the full conversation on each device - e.g. you write "a" to alice on your phone, turn it off, turn your pc on and receive "what do you mean?" from alice - the conversation is otherwise empty. That's not a good UX. You'd have to store the chat history somehow - and thus loose the privacy aspect of not storing it.

[gcatalfamo]

Giving phone numbers up, typical in the US, doesn't happen everywhere in the world.

[someonenice]

Whatsapp only needs one time authentication through SMS OTP. And whats app need not be installed in the same phone as that containing the number. I use number from a different country for my whatsapp. I dont even have the phone with me. So when the OTP is received, I ask my friend to provide it to me.

[ars]

That doesn't explain them actively blocking google voice numbers.

Or home phone numbers (landlines) for that matter. Let people use a landline number on a tablet.

[Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0]

I've had it working perfectly well with my google voice number for years now. When did they start blocking it?

The only problem I recall is that the initial text verification doesn't work - I had to do the phone call option - but this is a problem with gvoice, not WhatsApp: google blocks pretty much all server-triggered texts.

[jdeibele]

I ported my Cingular/AT&T number to Google Voice many years ago and six months ago ported it to Ting. There are a number of companies who consistently fail to deliver texts to that number. The most notable (for me) is Amazon. Yet dozens of other companies (Facebook, Google, etc.) are able to use it just fine.

I don't have the slightest idea on how to fix it. The only reason it worries me a bit is that I might miss texts from other people.

Switched to an iPhone so I could use "Find Friends" with spouse and kids.

[what_ever]

Yup, works for me as well!

[magazinelala]

Telegram also relies on phone numbers, and you need them to just to log in. You can log in once and stay logged forever on your computer without ever touching your phone again.

Whatsapp makes you to stay connected at the same time on your phone to use their web/desktop apps.

[pimeys]

WhatsApp doesn't store messages on their servers, which is one of those features I really like in a privacy point of view. Signal does the same, its web app only loads the messages from your phone and they are not stored to any servers.

[xorcist]

Doesn't that mean you can't carry on a conversation on another device?

It seems that was the main reason people didn't like Jabber to start with.

[mderazon]

Still, Signal's web app works without a phone AFAIK

[shliachtx]

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).

[cft]

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]

Actually yes, that is exactly what they do: Download everything from the phone.

[cft]

Including 2MB images in the conversation? Has someone verified this by looking at the traffic?

[Spare_account]

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]

Actually, the "latest" images (whatever it means) auto-load. Only when you go up in the history you have to click to load.

[fastball]

I hadn't, but now I have.

Using mitmproxy to snoop my phone, I see that all the data coming into my computer when I open up Whatsapp Web is originating from my phone. Including pictures.

That being said, all of my current conversations are on the new "end-to-end-encryption" thing, which might make a difference.

[ergl]

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.

[nindalf]

I can't answer that question but I can say that images shared with whatsapp are compressed to < 100kb

[cft]

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.

[nitin_flanker]

I guess no. I uses mobile data to access whatsapp on phone. My chat history is roughly more than 250 MB.

The time Whatsapp web takes to download images and messages is far way faster than my actual 2G network on phone.

[cosecantt]

I think you should try web app disabling the internet on your phone. Have you tried it? If watsup store the messages on its servers, it would be able to retrieve. But this is also not reliable since they may check phone connectivity before they retrieve from their "servers". I am still skeptical that they may store on servers behind the scene at least for speed and performance.

[squeaky-clean]

I just opened the Whatsapp web app (never used it before), and then immediately set Airplane Mode on my phone as soon as it scanned the QR code.

WhatsApp managed to load all my conversations (I don't have many) and the most recent message, for display in the list-view. But each conversation only has the most recently sent message. After a while I got a "Phone Not Connected" message. Seems like it really is only stored on your phone.

[nitin_flanker]

>they may store on servers behind the scene at least for speed and performance.

Yes, that's why I think so. They easily loads all the messages and images in just few seconds even when my phone's internet is too slow.

They won't let you use the web app when you're phone is disconnected, so there's no way to confirm it.

[fastball]

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.

[kome]

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

[pradex]

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.

[tszming]

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

[aadilmfarooqui]

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.

[kilroy123]

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.

[Cakez0r]

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

[tehrei]

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.

[nitin_flanker]

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.

[fastball]

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.

[746F7475]

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

[nonterrorist]

Unless you live in Canada.

[notatoad]

Check out 7-11, they had some good deals on low-usage phones last time I needed one.

[andreasklinger]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[cheez]

Yup, that's why I said a couple. You could afford 17, but only 2 of those would be suitable.

[charlesdm]

The $19 billion paid wasn't for their amazingly well engineered system, it was for their massive user base.

[max_]

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_]

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_]

I think you misunderstood me. I was talking about MY case. Not "hundreds of millions of people"

[corin_]

"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_]

ok. u got me.