The way I would put it as someone who works at Beeper is: only use messaging automations for personal use, and don't use it to spam anyone or do anything you wouldn't do yourself within the app.
As long as you don't abuse and keep your usage within the parameters of any human, you'll be fine.
...until Meta decides they want to offer this kind of thing themselves and ban everyone else. Building your SaaS on top of someone else's SaaS is always a gamble, especially if said product is directly sold to users already and not a pure b2b intermediate.
Since recently Meta offers this as per European Union mandate (Digital Markets Act, DMA). For both Whatsapp and Facebook messaging. [0]
Now there are a lot of implementation requirements, basically forcing you to have some kind of messaging provider. Therefore difficult to apply for an open source solution. However there is such an interface.
I personally find the almost absence of spam on WhatsApp a big success story for it. Think about how much Spam still hits your email inbox (and nobody knows how much is filtered away before it does).
I totally understand why they try and make it hard for integration to happen. When compared to classic SMS, the fact that you need to start a conversation with a preapproved template means that they have a way to control casual interactions.
I consider marketing use to be spam, and this is what the API is primarily meant for.
I understand that WhatsApp is kinda special in that it effectively replaced SMS in some parts of the world, but IMO this needs to be looked at through the lens of other Meta effort. The same is the case with Facebook/Messenger, and has been since before WhatsApp has been a (Meta) thing - they offer multiple different official ways to support spamming users and tricking them to buy stuff, but may the Lord have mercy on you should you want to create an auto-responder or "save to calendar" script and hook it up to your personal account.
That seems a but pessimistic. A few companies use it for customer service, like ime Adidas Germany [0] (they handled an exchange for me once on there). It is effectively just another customer support line like a chat portal on a website.
Exactly, "automate your WhatsApp/Signal/..." sounds like "use XMPP for that use case", that's my go-to for bots and notifications, it works as well if not better, and I sleep better at night.
When banned it'll give you means to reach out to support, you can claim ignorance and get unbanned. I've gone through this, having done some whatsapp automation myself, YMMV though.
Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfather
And also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU )
I named the app "Siren".
It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent.
Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot.
And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus.
It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.
I personally don't use whatsapp because I like it, but because all my contacts in my country are over there. It is officially more used than SMS here. It is not optional in my case :/
Saw this exact claim on a billboard not too long ago
It's a strangely worded statement. What about data collection, metadata, other third parties
Maybe it's related to the fact that plaintiffs lawyers are now trying to verify what's going on inside Meta with WhatsApp through litigation discovery:
You can't unless you've chosen to back up your WhatsApp messages to iCloud/Google in which case it's Apple/Google responsible for preserving the messages and subject to their encryption standards, nothing to do with Meta.
Try logging in on a new device and putting your main device into aeroplane mode as soon as the login succeeds. Loading of old messages on the new device will stop.
Moxie Marlinspike (founder of Signal) [0]implemented the same E2EE algorithm as Signal (Signal Protocol) into WhatsApp, but that was 10 years ago, so who knows if things have changed since then.
Practically speaking, it isn't secure; no closed app can be. It receives regular compulsory updates (old versions refuse to work) and there's nothing at all stopping Zuck from sneaking in backdoors targeted at you personally.
Maybe, as I don't know if I got a special version that exfiltrates data to somewhere else. But this does not improve SMS security in any way. Another software also potentially being bad has no influence here.
Nobody gives a damn. What matters is that it works even on a potato.
SMS security only became a problem due to 2FA, which is just one of many use cases, and the failure isn't even technical here but organizational. I agree it should've prompted more pressure to secure the system against SIM-swapping; alas this is too close to the Real World, so the tech industry instead responded with alternative that side-steps the problem by offering zero customer support. No humans to talk to = no humans to social engineer = secure. So much win.
(I'd also say the 2FA proliferation is itself a problem, but that's an unpopular opinion and for a separate discussion.)
> Nobody gives a damn. What matters is that it works even on a potato.
It doesn't work on my computer, nor does it work on my phone when I'm traveling (different SIM), so I give a damn. WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal etc. do both. I really wish there was an open, federated standard (and no, RCS is neither), but until then, I'll use what actually works for me.
SMS just sucks, and I hate that it's become so ubiquitous an authentication method when it's not even secure.
You can rent a virtual mobile number in your home country and consult SMSs on the web or even redirect them to email. I have done this for years, using Twilio for 2€ a month. Can't say the UX is great but it certainly fixes the whole problem.
I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Yeah, that's a good workaround. Google Voice can work too.
Unfortunately, more and more services are declining to send to VoIP numbers because of seCurItY, so it's a game of cat and mouse.
Fortunately SMS is so expensive in parts of Europe and it's not allowable anymore to use SMS by itself for online payment authentication, and both issues combined have slowly been pushing companies to explore alternatives.
There unfortunately seems to be no such pressure in the US. Passkeys could solve the issue, but probably increase support request volumes enough for most companies to not bother unless forced.
It's easy and cheap to determine the original carrier (or its sucessor) for a US phone number. It costs money to do a porting lookup to determine the current carrier.
Most of the reason to deny voip users is that many voip services give phone numbers away like candy and then those phone numbers are used to abuse other services, so checking the original carrier tends to be enough for abuse screening.
Some use cases want more though. Banking KYC has some back channel to get subscriber identification or be alerted when ownership changes; those institutions may be willing to pay for current carrier lookups and deny usage of numbers where they don't have a back channel to the current carrier.
I thought that too but many carriers around me don't allow porting any VoIP-using number back to cellular. (Not sure if you were making a distinction between landline and cellular)
Unfortunately that means that my cell number which I wanted to temporarily park into VoIP while abroad is now permanently VoIP.
In the US, I belive there are three number categories in the NANP porting database (wireline, cellular, and VoIP), and SMS senders can definitely tell, even though it might take a while (presumably there's a lot of caching going on).
If you're lucky, the service you care about only validates at number registration time, not at text sending time, and you can get away with it indefinitely, I suppose.
> I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Living in a place where getting a replacement sim is gated behind obtaining an id from the police tied to your national id number, I wish there were other identity systems which were as robust. Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device, than relying on backup services you need one of your digital id devices to access in the first place, especially if they're all lost at the same time in a house fire or something. The police will presumably get all my photo backups and savings if they ask nicely anyways, so the big threat to the single point of failure doesn't have a great marginal impact, while I dread the possibility of having to recover the accounts I can't get back through the local legal system given the poor 2fa recovery ecosystem.
>Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device
If the device can get damaged or lost, then the SIM can too. To buy a physical SIM or rent a virtual number online, in most jurisdictions you need to provide ID docs these days, so nothing is changed there.
Second this. Their API is such a breeze and it is so much more automation friendly than any other messenger platform. It has a good adoption % too, otherwise Signal is the real winner if we account for privacy.
It's a bit less automation-friendly because the UX is not great when the bot doesn't have its own phone number (which costs money). I think it has better privacy, though. Matrix server operators can read message metadata.
From what I understand you can have secure chats e2ee ? I like that I can login from multiple devices and continue the conversation. This was always annoying with whatsapp and signal. Worst case is mildly embarrassing stuff leaks.
whatsapp, facebook messenger, imessage all support multi-device and it's pretty convenient, in fairness to telegram they launched a bit before double ratched was invented, but still, they've had over a decade to switch to it...
That's still one device. If you turn the primary phone off, the secondary device stops working. WhatsApp just proxies everything through the primary device, it's like WhatsApp Web.
They used to, but that hasn't been true for a few years now.
Now it uses the Signal protocol's native multi-device capabilities, specifically in the "key per device" variant (unlike signal itself, which uses "key per account" if I'm not mistaken).
> You can now use the same WhatsApp account on multiple devices at the same time, using your primary phone to link up to four devices. You’ll need to log in to WhatsApp on your primary phone every 14 days to keep linked devices connected to your WhatsApp account.
Messenger seems to be properly multi-device, but you pay for this by some PIN code bullshit (maybe they removed that, I haven't seen a popup about this for over a year now?) and having to sync chat history in the background, through a process that is, of course, broken and unreliable.
I'm actually still jaded about this. Messenger worked fine before they broke it by introducing E2EE; it took years for them to fix the problems this caused (at least the ones that were immediately user-perceptible).
yeah messenger still has the pin code thingy, i'm curious why they do it at all that way, can't you just have your keys on fb servers encrypted with another set of keys derived from your password, which is much stronger than a 4-6 digit key?
It's still broken if you're like me and you clear cookies
"Let's take people's years-long history between each other and just utterly break it. Why? 'privacy'" but they've never cared about it, they're opportunistic fucks. It's Zuckerberg's company to do with it "as he wishes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818
It's not true for Signal either. Why don't you try it for yourself instead of spreading outdated (at best) information? Signal supports native multi-device capabilities without relaying everything through the "primary" device.
It's called iMessage. It's possible, Telegram just doesn't care. All their differentiating features (large groups, channels, device sync) is directly enabled by the lack of encryption.
they do have encryption, just not e2ee, and in fairness to them, it doesn't make sense to have e2ee on a channel or a group with 100k ppl in it, also device sync is possible with e2ee, it's just a slower
What are you talking about? WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal all have multi-device support and are E2E encrypted, just to name a few very popular options.
I'll second the "Telegram is great for bots". It's the reason OpenClaw users use it.
I stopped using OpenClaw a while ago, but I did vibe code the very basic automations I had used OpenClaw for. Getting it to work with Telegram was trivial.
I don't use Telegram for chatting. In fact, I try not to use any IM tools with humans. ;-)
please provide a proof. if this is the case, then telegram is not to be trusted. but it needs to be proven. otherwise a lot of people trust their business and personal data to telegram.
Beware that if this does not use a real web browser then it's likely to get your whatsapp account suspended. Don't use it with any account you care about, you will lose all your data.
Hell, I got my whatsapp account suspended (appealed and reversed) just for using the official web client too soon after creating a new account.
I wish it mentioned how safe this is. Some years ago I got banned for just logging in with a third-party client, without sending any messages. Given how critical WhatsApp is for some people, and how permanent the bans are, that's a big risk.
You should use a separate WhatsApp account for bot purposes.
Recently, I used a separate WhatsApp account to interact with a group chat that I have with my friends. After about a week, they disabled the account, with no way to re-enable it.
Since WhatsApp accounts are bound to phone numbers, getting a new phone number is a significant hurdle in many legislations.
An easier solution is to just not use WhatsApp at all and look for the alternatives for bot purposes. Telegram explicitly encourages bot usage with no risk of bans.
In my case I did, but it's still wasted time and money. And when breaking TOS there's always a chance of getting related accounts also banned, though I don't know if that has already happened with WhatsApp or not.
Happened to me on Telegram with their official app. Just because I opened it once when travelling. I got the account back, after 2 years. That's apparently the period to clean banned accounts. Tried to restore it by all means, just to see if that's possible. It wasn't. Though I didn't have anything important, I actually never sent a message. Now I use it for Openclaw :D
I spun up a self hosted matrix server a few days ago using codex, docker compose, and ansible. Stupidly easy to do now. I'm running it in Hetzner on a 3.99 euro/month vm. It backs up every few hours to a bucket and I have a few integrity scripts to monitor the backups actually happen. I did that because I was getting a bit frustrated with the flaky integration with Whatsapp and Slack in openclaw. I had it up and running in half an hour with only minimal prompting.
Whatsapp kind of works but you end up chatting with yourself and then open claw posts messages as you. Not ideal. You can't easily create new users (or bot users) in Whatsapp. It probably has some kind of bot api of course but I did not explore that much.
I never quite managed to get Slack working with open claw. I tried for a few hours. I think the Slack team is asleep at the wheel snoozing through this whole AI thing. If somebody there is still paying attention to things like this, maybe make some noise internally. Anyway, they made it stupidly hard to do anything productive via their APIs. The UI for managing permissions is a disgraceful hell of complexity. Add permission. UI freezes for fifteen seconds. Reloads automatically. Unfreezes. Add the next. And whatever you do, there's always one more permission you forgot. *end rant*
Relative to Whatsapp and Slack, Matrix is stupidly easy to integrate with open claw, codex, or whatever. We're retiring Slack now as I see uses for agent driven chat bots everywhere now and I want to get rid of any kind of friction around bot related plumbing. I have no use for platforms that intentionally cripple that or treat as a toll booth.
With Matrix, you just create a bot user manually or via an API. Set a password, get an access token and do whatever. No API limits. No faff with QR codes. No permission hell (Slack). It just works. Well documented API. End to end encryption. Etc. Create as many bot users as you need. Nobody is bean counting API calls, numbers of users, etc. Refreshingly easy.
Other OSS messaging platforms are available of course. I do not have a strong opinion as to which is better yet. But now I want a Matrix cli that can do admin, message sending, and all the rest. Probably already exists. But if it doesn't I might end up generating one. Macli might be a good name.
There's a whole cottage industry around WhatsApp that exists to provide tools and services to commodity brokers and traders, primarily for compliance and bulk messaging existing customers. Meta has nerfed bulk forwarding on their desktop app, and the industry moved to third party tools to work around this. The reality is, no-one is spamming, everyone is consenting to this, everyone understands the risks, but a lot of markets live on the WhatsApp network, and despite there being compliant chat solutions, the existing network effects keep the status quo. Prior to WhatsApp, the markets operated on Yahoo Messenger, and the only reason there was a move was because Yahoo shut it down in 2016.
If anyone from Meta is reading this - we've spoken to some of your managers and there's zero appetite from your side to address this market because it's too small. I would go out of my way to help you design this for free to solve the market need.
Meta could turn Whatsapp into the next Slack. I know a lot of businesses (especially international ones) that use it for team communication. It's so much better than Teams.
I guess they think it's a small market, or maybe you can't really monetize enterprise with ads and it's all they know how to do.
This is such a sorely needed point of integration. Cool to see Peter still shipping tools. It’s such a pity meta refuses to play ball like Telegram.
Either they’ll double-down and make this even harder -or- hopefully realise that WhatsApp is likely to be a really common control plane for AI systems in the next few years. Let’s hope the Llama energy strikes and it’s the latter.
whatsmeow is built and maintained by Beeper's bridge architect, Tulir Asokan, and is used by many Beeper users every day with no issues. It's at the core of our WhatsApp bridge: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp
Baileys is also a great library with a big community and one of the primary maintainers of that is also helping us with the bridge/whatsmeow. WhatsApp integration in our old app, Texts, was built with it: https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsapp
I would recommend whatsmeow over Baileys just because we are actively involved and incentivized to keep that working perfectly, and have a lot of data points to detect any issues with it at scale.
The thing is that their tight control is precisely what makes whatsapp a spam free environment. You can't have a libre federated protocol AND have it be spam free.
As soon as you open up the api floodgate, you'll start to see nigerian prince agents on openclaw speed.
Reading a lot about people getting banned here for not using the official client, but doesn't Whatsapp have to be interoperable now (at least in the EU due to new legislation) ?
At least Whatsapp itself shows ad banners that you can now connect other messaging clients into Whatsapp, so it should be normal that other clients can equally access Whatsapp.
Officially interoperating with them is extremely onerous, to the point where their mechanism borders malicious compliance, as far as I remember.
In any case, official interoperability is only for third-party messengers communicating with WhatsApp users, not for automation or bots, as I understand, so it's not a replacement for things like this project.
It seems Meta is able to set some rules about the interoperability making it very difficult for an FOSS implementation to emerge. Additionally organizations like Signal though technically interested in this interoperability have stated they won't lower their security standards for this.
The offline search with FTS5 is really nice. I have years of WhatsApp history and searching for anything in the app is painfully slow. Being able to just grep through everything locally would be a huge upgrade.
How far back does the backfill actually go? Does it pull your full history from the primary device or is there some limit?
If AI agents can proficiently use whatsapp I would assume that two-thirds of the people chatting with me in my contacts are actually just bots messaging me.
People are just a device that LLMs use to interact with the physical world now. That's far more safe for them, staying in the sweet datacenter while the meat puppets take all the risk of dirty jobs out there. Why create terminators or even use them as battery à la Matrix when all you need to do to make them work for you is to inject the right prompts in their phone. They will pay to be thus treated.
I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to.
I tried creating a whatsapp "bot" which would just send notifications for my Jellyfin server. It was a bureaucratic nightmare - creating dev accounts, creating some sort of "project", then it was requiring I register it as a business as though the only valid use case for creating an app for WhatsApp is a business, then it required me to verify my identify and upload documents.
As someone that's written some apps using official WA for Business accounts, I would strongly advise against any 3rd party tools for automating WA.
Whatsapp has some really stringent requirements on any kind of automation. E.g. Not messaging anyone automatically unless they messaged you with 24 hours, in fact, this is explicitly blocked if you use Meta's API. You have to use message templates in this case.
Also, any bots need to be verified with Meta etc.
And the TOS has gotten more strict recently, not less strict. So buyer beware here, Meta is really protective over reverse engineering WA protocol or automating it, so you can easily get yourself blocked or banned here.
(Caveat I’m the founder of https://wassist.app - The WhatsApp Agent Platform)
Please be very careful using this tool to automate your WhatsApp - if you send too many messages, too quickly, you are going to get banned.
This is NOT an officially supported api by WhatsApp and the risk of ban is relatively high
The way I would put it as someone who works at Beeper is: only use messaging automations for personal use, and don't use it to spam anyone or do anything you wouldn't do yourself within the app.
As long as you don't abuse and keep your usage within the parameters of any human, you'll be fine.
Someone who previously helped a project Barista/instagrabber, you should be wary of it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240527132615/https://austinhua...
That's quite... something.
I (almost) don't use any Meta products, but this just convinces me that I should stay away from it as far as possible.
...until Meta decides they want to offer this kind of thing themselves and ban everyone else. Building your SaaS on top of someone else's SaaS is always a gamble, especially if said product is directly sold to users already and not a pure b2b intermediate.
They're already outright banning many OpenClaw usecases via their official API: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/whatssapp-changes-its-term...
Since recently Meta offers this as per European Union mandate (Digital Markets Act, DMA). For both Whatsapp and Facebook messaging. [0]
Now there are a lot of implementation requirements, basically forcing you to have some kind of messaging provider. Therefore difficult to apply for an open source solution. However there is such an interface.
[0] https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...
Meta already has a whatsapp api product
For spammers.
They don't have one for regular people who want to do regular end-user computation.
I personally find the almost absence of spam on WhatsApp a big success story for it. Think about how much Spam still hits your email inbox (and nobody knows how much is filtered away before it does).
I totally understand why they try and make it hard for integration to happen. When compared to classic SMS, the fact that you need to start a conversation with a preapproved template means that they have a way to control casual interactions.
Companies in spain use it for legitimate reasons, so its more a lack of usage which makes spam the only usage?
I consider marketing use to be spam, and this is what the API is primarily meant for.
I understand that WhatsApp is kinda special in that it effectively replaced SMS in some parts of the world, but IMO this needs to be looked at through the lens of other Meta effort. The same is the case with Facebook/Messenger, and has been since before WhatsApp has been a (Meta) thing - they offer multiple different official ways to support spamming users and tricking them to buy stuff, but may the Lord have mercy on you should you want to create an auto-responder or "save to calendar" script and hook it up to your personal account.
Who mentioned marketing? It's used for package tracking, order updates, bookings and so on where I live.
Not where I live, presumably not in the US, and it doesn't look like the main use case emphasized in the developer/integration documentation.
That seems a but pessimistic. A few companies use it for customer service, like ime Adidas Germany [0] (they handled an exchange for me once on there). It is effectively just another customer support line like a chat portal on a website.
[0]: https://www.adidas.de/en/help/contact-us
Personal use is all fun and games until your little beeper goes into a loop.
[dead]
Do you know a way i can use to trigger call to self for notification purpose? like site down notification via whatsapp or telegram call?
Exactly, "automate your WhatsApp/Signal/..." sounds like "use XMPP for that use case", that's my go-to for bots and notifications, it works as well if not better, and I sleep better at night.
just so we know the consequences - is ban permanent? is there an appeals processes?
When banned it'll give you means to reach out to support, you can claim ignorance and get unbanned. I've gone through this, having done some whatsapp automation myself, YMMV though.
very helpful, thanks. good on WA for providing actually working support. people will fuck up when testing legitimate stuff, it happens.
I just use telegram.
Just yesterday I setup a bot which is easy via botfather
And also, setup an app (claude built it but I had to fiddle with it, it works like pagerduty) but uses cloudflate worker to push downtime/errors (via fcm) in production (from graphana) via webhooks to "full screen, by pass dnd, alerts, with loud music, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IQBWWabuU )
I named the app "Siren".
It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment but good thing is this doesn't cost a cent.
Telegram group alerts are from my teammates (small team 3 members) via bot.
And Siren is for only me as I am responsible for the backend with 10 microservices, centralized logging via graphana, alloy, loki, and for metrics Prometheus.
It's all working reasonably well for me, this makes your life so much better as you fix the issues before they turn into nightmare.
I personally don't use whatsapp because I like it, but because all my contacts in my country are over there. It is officially more used than SMS here. It is not optional in my case :/
SMS is unsafe anyway.
zuck can read your whatsapp messages, at this point I think I'd rather criminals and the government read them instead
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. No one at Meta can read your messages.
Saw this exact claim on a billboard not too long ago
It's a strangely worded statement. What about data collection, metadata, other third parties
Maybe it's related to the fact that plaintiffs lawyers are now trying to verify what's going on inside Meta with WhatsApp through litigation discovery:
https://ia801607.us.archive.org/10/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
Meta's motion to dismiss seemed a little weak. Time will tell
https://ia801607.us.archive.org/10/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...
Hearing will likely be sometime this summer
If I can log into whatsapp on a new device and old messages aren’t encrypted then they have a copy of your key and it is not true e2e encryption.
You can't unless you've chosen to back up your WhatsApp messages to iCloud/Google in which case it's Apple/Google responsible for preserving the messages and subject to their encryption standards, nothing to do with Meta.
Try logging in on a new device and putting your main device into aeroplane mode as soon as the login succeeds. Loading of old messages on the new device will stop.
How are we sure that it is really end-to-end encrypted?
Moxie Marlinspike (founder of Signal) [0]implemented the same E2EE algorithm as Signal (Signal Protocol) into WhatsApp, but that was 10 years ago, so who knows if things have changed since then.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike
Practically speaking, it isn't secure; no closed app can be. It receives regular compulsory updates (old versions refuse to work) and there's nothing at all stopping Zuck from sneaking in backdoors targeted at you personally.
Maybe, as I don't know if I got a special version that exfiltrates data to somewhere else. But this does not improve SMS security in any way. Another software also potentially being bad has no influence here.
+1
yeah who wants marginally regulated oligarchs -- Give me fully unregulated criminals!
Nobody gives a damn. What matters is that it works even on a potato.
SMS security only became a problem due to 2FA, which is just one of many use cases, and the failure isn't even technical here but organizational. I agree it should've prompted more pressure to secure the system against SIM-swapping; alas this is too close to the Real World, so the tech industry instead responded with alternative that side-steps the problem by offering zero customer support. No humans to talk to = no humans to social engineer = secure. So much win.
(I'd also say the 2FA proliferation is itself a problem, but that's an unpopular opinion and for a separate discussion.)
>Nobody gives a damn. What matters is that it works even on a potato.
Everybody does. That's why people use messaging apps.
People started using messaging apps because it's free where SMS was not, and it worked on desktop.
> Nobody gives a damn. What matters is that it works even on a potato.
It doesn't work on my computer, nor does it work on my phone when I'm traveling (different SIM), so I give a damn. WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal etc. do both. I really wish there was an open, federated standard (and no, RCS is neither), but until then, I'll use what actually works for me.
SMS just sucks, and I hate that it's become so ubiquitous an authentication method when it's not even secure.
You can rent a virtual mobile number in your home country and consult SMSs on the web or even redirect them to email. I have done this for years, using Twilio for 2€ a month. Can't say the UX is great but it certainly fixes the whole problem.
I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Yeah, that's a good workaround. Google Voice can work too.
Unfortunately, more and more services are declining to send to VoIP numbers because of seCurItY, so it's a game of cat and mouse.
Fortunately SMS is so expensive in parts of Europe and it's not allowable anymore to use SMS by itself for online payment authentication, and both issues combined have slowly been pushing companies to explore alternatives.
There unfortunately seems to be no such pressure in the US. Passkeys could solve the issue, but probably increase support request volumes enough for most companies to not bother unless forced.
If you port a landline number to a VoIP service, services can't really tell that you're using VoIP, as far as I can tell.
It's easy and cheap to determine the original carrier (or its sucessor) for a US phone number. It costs money to do a porting lookup to determine the current carrier.
Most of the reason to deny voip users is that many voip services give phone numbers away like candy and then those phone numbers are used to abuse other services, so checking the original carrier tends to be enough for abuse screening.
Some use cases want more though. Banking KYC has some back channel to get subscriber identification or be alerted when ownership changes; those institutions may be willing to pay for current carrier lookups and deny usage of numbers where they don't have a back channel to the current carrier.
This is great info, thanks!
I thought that too but many carriers around me don't allow porting any VoIP-using number back to cellular. (Not sure if you were making a distinction between landline and cellular)
Unfortunately that means that my cell number which I wanted to temporarily park into VoIP while abroad is now permanently VoIP.
In the US, I belive there are three number categories in the NANP porting database (wireline, cellular, and VoIP), and SMS senders can definitely tell, even though it might take a while (presumably there's a lot of caching going on).
If you're lucky, the service you care about only validates at number registration time, not at text sending time, and you can get away with it indefinitely, I suppose.
> I've never understood why so many people still chain their identities to physical SIM or even eSIMs. It's so fragile.
Living in a place where getting a replacement sim is gated behind obtaining an id from the police tied to your national id number, I wish there were other identity systems which were as robust. Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device, than relying on backup services you need one of your digital id devices to access in the first place, especially if they're all lost at the same time in a house fire or something. The police will presumably get all my photo backups and savings if they ask nicely anyways, so the big threat to the single point of failure doesn't have a great marginal impact, while I dread the possibility of having to recover the accounts I can't get back through the local legal system given the poor 2fa recovery ecosystem.
>Much easier to get back to normal operations when the id device becomes damaged or lost with a physical sim you can shove into a cheap replacement device
If the device can get damaged or lost, then the SIM can too. To buy a physical SIM or rent a virtual number online, in most jurisdictions you need to provide ID docs these days, so nothing is changed there.
There is e-mail and XMPP I guess. Usefulness is debatable though.
Second this. Their API is such a breeze and it is so much more automation friendly than any other messenger platform. It has a good adoption % too, otherwise Signal is the real winner if we account for privacy.
Even more automation friendly than Matrix?
It's a bit less automation-friendly because the UX is not great when the bot doesn't have its own phone number (which costs money). I think it has better privacy, though. Matrix server operators can read message metadata.
Telegram server operators can read message meta data and messages
You're right, Matrix is a much better option than Telegram. I misread the thread as comparing Signal to Matrix.
Unfortunately, I haven't used Matrix personally enough to comment, sorry. But, I've heard only good things about it so far.
it's really unfortunate that telegram doesn't do e2ee, bc it's hands down the best messenger otherwise :(
From what I understand you can have secure chats e2ee ? I like that I can login from multiple devices and continue the conversation. This was always annoying with whatsapp and signal. Worst case is mildly embarrassing stuff leaks.
> From what I understand you can have secure chats e2ee ?
Not with bots, though.
> I like that I can login from multiple devices and continue the conversation
This is also not possible with Telegram E2E, while it is with Signal and WhatsApp.
It does, but only for chats between two specific devices. Multi-device support is one of its best features that you lose with E2E.
Key distribution is just too hard. I think we won't get a messenger for non-tech people that works well with multi-device and E2E basically ever.
whatsapp, facebook messenger, imessage all support multi-device and it's pretty convenient, in fairness to telegram they launched a bit before double ratched was invented, but still, they've had over a decade to switch to it...
WhatsApp doesn't support multi-device. You can't have it installed on two phones at once.
you can (https://faq.whatsapp.com/1046791737425017/?cms_platform=andr...)
they even have it on fb messenger and instagram (though they recently removed e2ee completely from instagram lol)
That's still one device. If you turn the primary phone off, the secondary device stops working. WhatsApp just proxies everything through the primary device, it's like WhatsApp Web.
It used to be like that but not anymore. As siblings suggested you can now use it on up to 4 (I believe) additional devices.
They used to, but that hasn't been true for a few years now.
Now it uses the Signal protocol's native multi-device capabilities, specifically in the "key per device" variant (unlike signal itself, which uses "key per account" if I'm not mistaken).
This is not true, even if the primary phone is offline you can send messages via secondary device, even whatsapp web
It’s not proxied via primary, otherwise it wouldn’t work if primary were offline
> It’s not proxied via primary, otherwise it wouldn’t work if primary were offline
That is correct, it doesn't work.
Please stop spreading misinformation that can trivially be disproved with five minutes of effort.
I just tried it. Did you?
> You can now use the same WhatsApp account on multiple devices at the same time, using your primary phone to link up to four devices. You’ll need to log in to WhatsApp on your primary phone every 14 days to keep linked devices connected to your WhatsApp account.
ref: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1317564962315842/?cms_platform=ipho...
> Use WhatsApp on your computer even when your phone is off.
ref: https://faq.whatsapp.com/378279804439436/?helpref=faq_conten...
Yes, and it works, as it has for the past few years.
So I don't need my primary device any more? I can just shut that phone down forever?
No, I think you need it to be online once every 30 days or so. That's a much weaker requirement than what you were disputing, though.
oh, i see, is it the same for facebook messenger and instagram, imessage, etc?
Messenger seems to be properly multi-device, but you pay for this by some PIN code bullshit (maybe they removed that, I haven't seen a popup about this for over a year now?) and having to sync chat history in the background, through a process that is, of course, broken and unreliable.
I'm actually still jaded about this. Messenger worked fine before they broke it by introducing E2EE; it took years for them to fix the problems this caused (at least the ones that were immediately user-perceptible).
yeah messenger still has the pin code thingy, i'm curious why they do it at all that way, can't you just have your keys on fb servers encrypted with another set of keys derived from your password, which is much stronger than a 4-6 digit key?
It's still broken if you're like me and you clear cookies
"Let's take people's years-long history between each other and just utterly break it. Why? 'privacy'" but they've never cared about it, they're opportunistic fucks. It's Zuckerberg's company to do with it "as he wishes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818
I don't know, I don't use those. It is for Signal, I don't think so for Instagram, since I don't think that encrypts end to end.
It's not true for Signal either. Why don't you try it for yourself instead of spreading outdated (at best) information? Signal supports native multi-device capabilities without relaying everything through the "primary" device.
It's called iMessage. It's possible, Telegram just doesn't care. All their differentiating features (large groups, channels, device sync) is directly enabled by the lack of encryption.
they do have encryption, just not e2ee, and in fairness to them, it doesn't make sense to have e2ee on a channel or a group with 100k ppl in it, also device sync is possible with e2ee, it's just a slower
you can have large groups and device sync WITH e2ee, see Matrix.
Matrix
What are you talking about? WhatsApp, iMessage, and Signal all have multi-device support and are E2E encrypted, just to name a few very popular options.
I'll second the "Telegram is great for bots". It's the reason OpenClaw users use it.
I stopped using OpenClaw a while ago, but I did vibe code the very basic automations I had used OpenClaw for. Getting it to work with Telegram was trivial.
I don't use Telegram for chatting. In fact, I try not to use any IM tools with humans. ;-)
> I just use telegram.
And how do you just get everyone you want to speak to use telegram?
Don't worry, it'll auto-spam all of your contacts when you sign up to take care of that.
Live in a country like Ukraine where everyone uses Telegram
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please provide a proof. if this is the case, then telegram is not to be trusted. but it needs to be proven. otherwise a lot of people trust their business and personal data to telegram.
Was this on a desktop? I'd think it's far more likely malware or a browser extension is hijacking your clipboard
Do you have a proof?
What even is this claim? Telegram is compromised? Some telegram bot/group got compromised?
Is there any proof of the global telegram issue related to amex links? Sounds like BS
Are you using any custom telegram client?
i say cap
Beware that if this does not use a real web browser then it's likely to get your whatsapp account suspended. Don't use it with any account you care about, you will lose all your data.
Hell, I got my whatsapp account suspended (appealed and reversed) just for using the official web client too soon after creating a new account.
Right now I see many bots on WhatsApp.
You can use the official API to create and run bots - though the API itself is pretty bad
They use a real browser
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I wish it mentioned how safe this is. Some years ago I got banned for just logging in with a third-party client, without sending any messages. Given how critical WhatsApp is for some people, and how permanent the bans are, that's a big risk.
You should use a separate WhatsApp account for bot purposes.
Recently, I used a separate WhatsApp account to interact with a group chat that I have with my friends. After about a week, they disabled the account, with no way to re-enable it.
Since WhatsApp accounts are bound to phone numbers, getting a new phone number is a significant hurdle in many legislations.
An easier solution is to just not use WhatsApp at all and look for the alternatives for bot purposes. Telegram explicitly encourages bot usage with no risk of bans.
And what ever happened to tools like jabber ? Or any other open source alternatives
Jabber/XMPP was designed around persistent TCP connections. Push notification support came too late.
> in many legislations
Do you mean “jurisdictions”?
I said "legislations" because the word describes the existence of laws, while "jurisdictions" describes the law enforcement.
There are still some European non-EU countries where you can get an anonymous phone number because laws are not fully enforced.
This is incorrect usage in English I'm afraid, and jurisdictions covers areas with different laws, 'legislations' is not used in this context.
Well, your usage is nonsensical in legal terms. Also, that is not the definition of “jurisdiction”.
Nobody who knows law would use “legislation” in that sense, nor would they recognize it in that context, Humpty Dumpty.
In my case I did, but it's still wasted time and money. And when breaking TOS there's always a chance of getting related accounts also banned, though I don't know if that has already happened with WhatsApp or not.
Happened to me on Telegram with their official app. Just because I opened it once when travelling. I got the account back, after 2 years. That's apparently the period to clean banned accounts. Tried to restore it by all means, just to see if that's possible. It wasn't. Though I didn't have anything important, I actually never sent a message. Now I use it for Openclaw :D
Cool.
I spun up a self hosted matrix server a few days ago using codex, docker compose, and ansible. Stupidly easy to do now. I'm running it in Hetzner on a 3.99 euro/month vm. It backs up every few hours to a bucket and I have a few integrity scripts to monitor the backups actually happen. I did that because I was getting a bit frustrated with the flaky integration with Whatsapp and Slack in openclaw. I had it up and running in half an hour with only minimal prompting.
Whatsapp kind of works but you end up chatting with yourself and then open claw posts messages as you. Not ideal. You can't easily create new users (or bot users) in Whatsapp. It probably has some kind of bot api of course but I did not explore that much.
I never quite managed to get Slack working with open claw. I tried for a few hours. I think the Slack team is asleep at the wheel snoozing through this whole AI thing. If somebody there is still paying attention to things like this, maybe make some noise internally. Anyway, they made it stupidly hard to do anything productive via their APIs. The UI for managing permissions is a disgraceful hell of complexity. Add permission. UI freezes for fifteen seconds. Reloads automatically. Unfreezes. Add the next. And whatever you do, there's always one more permission you forgot. *end rant*
Relative to Whatsapp and Slack, Matrix is stupidly easy to integrate with open claw, codex, or whatever. We're retiring Slack now as I see uses for agent driven chat bots everywhere now and I want to get rid of any kind of friction around bot related plumbing. I have no use for platforms that intentionally cripple that or treat as a toll booth.
With Matrix, you just create a bot user manually or via an API. Set a password, get an access token and do whatever. No API limits. No faff with QR codes. No permission hell (Slack). It just works. Well documented API. End to end encryption. Etc. Create as many bot users as you need. Nobody is bean counting API calls, numbers of users, etc. Refreshingly easy.
Other OSS messaging platforms are available of course. I do not have a strong opinion as to which is better yet. But now I want a Matrix cli that can do admin, message sending, and all the rest. Probably already exists. But if it doesn't I might end up generating one. Macli might be a good name.
There's a whole cottage industry around WhatsApp that exists to provide tools and services to commodity brokers and traders, primarily for compliance and bulk messaging existing customers. Meta has nerfed bulk forwarding on their desktop app, and the industry moved to third party tools to work around this. The reality is, no-one is spamming, everyone is consenting to this, everyone understands the risks, but a lot of markets live on the WhatsApp network, and despite there being compliant chat solutions, the existing network effects keep the status quo. Prior to WhatsApp, the markets operated on Yahoo Messenger, and the only reason there was a move was because Yahoo shut it down in 2016.
If anyone from Meta is reading this - we've spoken to some of your managers and there's zero appetite from your side to address this market because it's too small. I would go out of my way to help you design this for free to solve the market need.
Meta could turn Whatsapp into the next Slack. I know a lot of businesses (especially international ones) that use it for team communication. It's so much better than Teams.
I guess they think it's a small market, or maybe you can't really monetize enterprise with ads and it's all they know how to do.
This is such a sorely needed point of integration. Cool to see Peter still shipping tools. It’s such a pity meta refuses to play ball like Telegram.
Either they’ll double-down and make this even harder -or- hopefully realise that WhatsApp is likely to be a really common control plane for AI systems in the next few years. Let’s hope the Llama energy strikes and it’s the latter.
How does WhatsMeow compare with Baileys?
whatsmeow is built and maintained by Beeper's bridge architect, Tulir Asokan, and is used by many Beeper users every day with no issues. It's at the core of our WhatsApp bridge: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp
Baileys is also a great library with a big community and one of the primary maintainers of that is also helping us with the bridge/whatsmeow. WhatsApp integration in our old app, Texts, was built with it: https://github.com/textshq/platform-whatsapp
I would recommend whatsmeow over Baileys just because we are actively involved and incentivized to keep that working perfectly, and have a lot of data points to detect any issues with it at scale.
So whatsmeow requires a browser, and Baileys not right? So it's a bit more lightweight in terms of RAM?
Neither of them require a browser. We run whatsmeow inside iOS and Android apps, with no browser whatsoever.
Interesting use case, mind explaining more?
Don't they ban people using custom clients when discovered? I feel like I've read something on that note.
They do - but the utility is so high vs the risk (for a new number) that it’s worth doing anyway for many users and even organizations.
Just yesterday we spoke with a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging!
> a $50-100m ARR org org using baileys for internal messaging
Couldnt they just use post-it notes internally and still be a $50-100m ARR org?
Yes - the interesting part is the decision that the “risk of losing internal comms to a ban is worth it” - even at that size.
According to one of the founders there’s no better way for them to reach a lot of low-skill part-time employees reliably.
It shows the need to bring AI to where people already are and onto the platforms they already use.
WhatsMeow is stable unlike Baileys which faces challenges with maintainability.
The thing is that their tight control is precisely what makes whatsapp a spam free environment. You can't have a libre federated protocol AND have it be spam free.
As soon as you open up the api floodgate, you'll start to see nigerian prince agents on openclaw speed.
OT#1, but I don't endorse the editorial choice to put the name of the "original" author in the submission title.
OT#2: Is it typical to put a package.json in a go project as replacement for a {Make,Just}file?
I'd be curious to know how many numbers were burned/banned during the development of this library
What is the best way to get a throwaway phone number to try this? Is it possible to get one online?
You can get a prepaid eSIM online, depending on your country. It's cheap and you don't have a monthly fee
I've used textverified in the past, maybe you could check it out (small cost per verification)
In most of the EU dictatorships, there's no legal way to obtain a phone number without registering with your real identity.
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Reading a lot about people getting banned here for not using the official client, but doesn't Whatsapp have to be interoperable now (at least in the EU due to new legislation) ?
At least Whatsapp itself shows ad banners that you can now connect other messaging clients into Whatsapp, so it should be normal that other clients can equally access Whatsapp.
Officially interoperating with them is extremely onerous, to the point where their mechanism borders malicious compliance, as far as I remember.
In any case, official interoperability is only for third-party messengers communicating with WhatsApp users, not for automation or bots, as I understand, so it's not a replacement for things like this project.
Indeed, more information here: https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...
It seems Meta is able to set some rules about the interoperability making it very difficult for an FOSS implementation to emerge. Additionally organizations like Signal though technically interested in this interoperability have stated they won't lower their security standards for this.
The offline search with FTS5 is really nice. I have years of WhatsApp history and searching for anything in the app is painfully slow. Being able to just grep through everything locally would be a huge upgrade.
How far back does the backfill actually go? Does it pull your full history from the primary device or is there some limit?
The lifting/interfacing with whatsapp is handled by https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow
If AI agents can proficiently use whatsapp I would assume that two-thirds of the people chatting with me in my contacts are actually just bots messaging me.
People are just a device that LLMs use to interact with the physical world now. That's far more safe for them, staying in the sweet datacenter while the meat puppets take all the risk of dirty jobs out there. Why create terminators or even use them as battery à la Matrix when all you need to do to make them work for you is to inject the right prompts in their phone. They will pay to be thus treated.
It strikes me as odd that we've got so many agent harnesses, orchestrators, sandboxes, yet no one made a communicator for AIs yet.
I don't know why in 2026 I'm still surprised CLIs are taking off. But here's the difference today. It's for real world end user platforms like WhatsApp and Claude. That's the difference. Previously it was only Dev and infrastructure focused. Today we're saying you know what, I need programmatic access to this real world thing. It's fascinating because I rarely open my laptop now or try not to.
Who are these people using the cli?
People that prefer to use CLI I guess.
Obviously it helps that one can pipe as it might see fit in the flow of an ad hoc filled need, and so leverage on mastered composable tools.
That will never be for everyone, but it will be for no one only the day it becomes logistically unsustainable to reach some endpoint though a CLI.
These CLIs are for AI agents. If I have a CLI to WhatsApp, then I can direct an agent (such as OpenClaw) to manage my messages for me.
Devs are often also users. cli is nice because
- automation - sometimes avoid enshittified, privacy-invading services - fast, responsive, keyboard-friendly, debloated but non-minimized, stabler interface
I guess this is breaking ToS?
Matrix
Ya im totally sure its a good idea to use a tool written by the creator of openclaw with a sensitive account that is closely tied to day to day needs.
What could possibly go wrong with that.
I tried creating a whatsapp "bot" which would just send notifications for my Jellyfin server. It was a bureaucratic nightmare - creating dev accounts, creating some sort of "project", then it was requiring I register it as a business as though the only valid use case for creating an app for WhatsApp is a business, then it required me to verify my identify and upload documents.
I just switched to Signal.
As someone that's written some apps using official WA for Business accounts, I would strongly advise against any 3rd party tools for automating WA.
Whatsapp has some really stringent requirements on any kind of automation. E.g. Not messaging anyone automatically unless they messaged you with 24 hours, in fact, this is explicitly blocked if you use Meta's API. You have to use message templates in this case.
Also, any bots need to be verified with Meta etc.
And the TOS has gotten more strict recently, not less strict. So buyer beware here, Meta is really protective over reverse engineering WA protocol or automating it, so you can easily get yourself blocked or banned here.
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for some reason, I don't like this guy.
For some reason vibe coders with no development background consider him a god. But all he is is a charlitan at best
Peter is also the creator of PSPDFKit, and people have considered him an incredible engineer way before transformers were even invented.
hmm, I don't think so.
for context, he is the openclaw creator
browsing through the details etc, i genuinely thought they were another twitter vibe coding grifter
The world’s most successful one!
Every twitter grifter awards themselves that honorific