I think this might only be true on Android? Apple has a strict policy that the basic app functionality must work even without permissions. And testing right now, I can send messages to direct numbers without having given access to my contacts.

I don't have this issue at all, I just selectively only give it access to some contacts.

It seems to no longer even scan the contacts by itself, only when you hit "New Chat", press the triple dots and then "Refresh".

Still a pretty garbage app but at least in terms of this it seems to have actually improved.

> WhatsApp is the only chat app I've encountered that refuses to work if you don't give it access to your contacts*

I've never given it access to my contacts. (iOS.) It's worked fine. I recently started giving it access to a limited set of my contacts, but that was for convenience.

This is why you should use Graphene's contact scopes and only allow access to contacts that you want to contact on WhatsApp.

Telegram did this for me when I tested it years ago. Instantly uninstalled.

Perhaps you'd be interested in learning that you can initiate chats to phone numbers (regardless of contact status) by going to wa.me/<phone-number>

I've never tested it without contacts permissions though.

Works on iphone though.

I miss the days when I could start Pidgin and it'd automatically log into every single service I use, and I could chat with anybody regardless of which service they were on. I didn't need half a dozen different apps running just to chat. It felt like a utopia compared to what we have today.

I also have many messaging apps, but they are all different personas of myself, intended for different audiences. I have zero interest in mixing them.

This is why we must have open interoperable standards, like the Internet used to and was meant to be.

People tried to standardize on XMPP back in the day, but capitalism figured out that standardize didn't fit their profit motivation. These days XMPP is a bit of an dated XML-heavy protocol, but Matrix is a newer alternative, and it supports bridging.

Yeah this only cements WhatsApp's monopoly because everyone has to implement WhatsApp's proprietary protocol.

That's from 2024. Has there been any recent updates?

The only possible way to return to open standards and protocols would be to make a closed protocol illegal.

That was vaguely the state of things before the DMCA here in the US. Sega had no legal ability to stop other companies from selling cartridges that played on a genesis for example, and in one court case the Judge ruled that the company was legally right to breach Sega's trademark rights to achieve that interoperability. Sony, Nintendo, and others all lost similar suits about trying to restrict interoperability with their products and software.

In fact, Sega was going to lose that case so badly, and the precedent was so clearly beneficial to the consumer and market, that they chose to settle it to prevent the precedent from being established. That this is something you can choose to do well after it becomes obvious how the case should end is an atrocious feature of the US "justice" system. You shouldn't get to take a case all the way to a verdict, and then have an appeals court poke holes in your claims and then say "actually we don't want any of this on the record anymore"

The DMCA as written makes it very easy to prevent interoperability by law simply with a bit of code here or there to make token efforts to prevent access.

No thanks, I wouldn't want my text messages used to train an AI. Or my metadata used to improve surveillance.

I'm not sure Apple can be a good steward of such an open, plug-in based solution - they would always put in some restrictions to make the process very complicated and not accessible to platforms and developers.

At the same time, making it possible to choose WhatsApp for the default messaging app has been a great relief for those not locked into Messages.

A complication is that iMessage supports a ton of collaboration features that don't (and largely can't) exist across other messaging apps. The messaging bits will have the same nerfed interface as SMS/RCS because of missing capabilities.

Despite having the appearance of a messaging app, iMessage operates as a backbone for a lot of OS capability that is surprisingly deep.

That seems like a good idea in the sense that it's better than separate apps for everything, but it's also probably the wrong level of abstraction. For example: what happens if you try to create a group chat containing an RCS user, a WhatsApp user, and a Telegram user? Ideally it would just work, but I don't see how that's possible without support for such a thing at a deeper level than just the UI layer.

It's been a pain point for me for years with many services.

Shameless plug on the topic: https://www.fer.xyz/2021/04/i18n

Completely and utterly ignored by Google >:(

Android: You can get the message db with root. You can export individual chats in text version right from the interface. The message media is stored in the user folders.

Still bad, sure, but there are worse offenders.

Being opt-in for the WhatsApp user reduces the severity of that problem a lot, though certainly not to zero for those who do opt in.

This smells unbelievably dodgy

I was curious too, but I figured I was just an out of touch millennial who didn't know what all the kids were chatting on these days and didn't want to say anything...

Well the Indian government can consider a law similar to the EU Digital Market Acts that enforces such behaviour.

I see no reason why none of all those extremely talented developers that America desperately needs can't come up with a messaging service of their own.

FTA: As reported by Heise Online, Signal and Threema will not establish connections allowing for interoperability with WhatsApp.

I wouldn't want any cross-talk between my secure messaging app and anything that is owned by Meta.

Your comms are only as secure as the node receiving them.