I'm aware of https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-whatsapp which I'm personally interested in, which uses a reverse engineered implementation of the WhatsApp web protocol.
People already have done that. The most famous example is the yowsup [1] python library. The problem with these client implementations is that WhatsApp is banning any numbers that use them [2]. So most recent attempts to use WhatsApp outside of the official clients revolve around using WhatsApp Web somehow. That appears to work better, but even here if you are using it on a long term basis, WhatsApp might ban you.
Ultimately, WhatsApp is a bad host when it comes to using their service outside of the official app. This is really sad for people like me who don't want to install WhatsApp on their phones because it sends too much of my data to Facebook... probably that's precisely why they are so strict, to get all the data because that's all they get (the service is gratis after all). That and spam.
[1]: https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup [2]: http://google.com/search?q=yowsup+name+ban
Offering low-volume non-customer-facing free access to a product like this would likely make everyone here quite happy.
[1]: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/getting-starte...
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/faq
> For single-instance production server setup, we recommend at least 250 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, and 4 core CPU.
https://www.facebook.com/business/m/whatsapp/business-api/
> In order to ensure a high quality experience for businesses and users, we're in a limited public preview. If you'd like to work with us, submit more information about your business for consideration as we continue to expand our availability.
I suspect that one reason they're not doing that is to prevent spambots. This is probably a valid concern, as experience as shown that preventing spam is a hard problem.
https://neosmart.net/blog/2018/imessage-for-windows/
Taking full advantage of UWP features and functionality.
There are jabber and slack gateways.
In practicality,I would like to see a gitter to IRC gateway,because of foss projects usage of both platforms.
And this obviously does exist. So that’s not the reason.
That makes a huge difference: in Europe it's very unlikely that everyone out of any group of friends has an iPhone, making Whatsapp, Telegram etc the goto solutions for group messages.
Apple is also huge in Japan, but I don't know what kind of chat apps are used there.
Whatsapp has been notorious for taking down third party APIs and any tools that allow message automation.
I would like to move away from WhatsApp for privacy reasons and out of principle.
Could I use this to set an auto-reply message to users contacting me, redirecting them to my new messenger e.g. Signal?
On that point though, what do people think when they see WhatsApp the name? I get the whole whats up thing, but whenever I see the name I think "What's App???" as in What is App???
