Mastodawn

Q: Whatever happened to our promised Signal - WhatsApp compatibility?

Q: Whatever happened to our promised Signal - WhatsApp compatibility? - Lemmy.World

The news first came in 2024 [https://www.techspot.com/news/102165-whatsapp-messenger-become-interoperable-third-party-chat-apps.html], but it’s been very quiet since. I’ve been waiting this whole time to jettison WhatsApp from my phone. Is it available only in some parts of the world? If so can I spoof it? We know that adversarial interoperability [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability] works, so why have we not been able to make this work? All else failing, are there any unofficial WhatsApp clients I can use to preserve my privacy?

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lennee Mar 15

birdychat and haiket, wtf are those

yeah exactly

seems like malicious compliance to me yeah, we are open to different messengers - picks 2 that have 5 users between them.

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Zak Mar 15

While I have no doubt Meta is doing the absolute minimum it can to comply, they’re not allowed to pick and choose arbitrarily. They can have technical and security requirements, but we’re not hearing from major players about how WhatsApp is refusing them access when they’ve asked.

I’m inclined to think most of them either don’t want to (Signal doesn’t) or aren’t in a position to make it work.

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Zak Mar 15

There’s some confusion because of the reference to “Signal protocol”. This refers to the key exchange and encryption protocol originally developed for Signal and adopted by WhatsApp, iMessage, and others.

This is a means of establishing a secure end-to-end encrypted conversation, not a federated protocol for different messaging networks to interoperate. WhatsApp announced that Signal protocol or a compatible E2EE implementation is one of their requirements to allow third parties to interoperate.

Signal has signaled its intent not to interoperate with WhatsApp or anything else several times over the years for both technical and security reasons.