A point to those that support migrating to alternatives such as Signal. Signal is good, but far from great for a single reason: you need a phone number. This is very bad in necsec and reliability terms, my case:
Reliability: like more and more people, I travel all the time between countries and live out of Airbnbs. Hence my pre-paid phone numbers changes very regularly. If I lose my phone, I lose the phone number, I also lose my Whatsapp/Signal key associated with my phone number.
Netsec: A phone number is associated with your physical identity, you might not care, but more and more people do care about this stuff. Yes there are ways around that, but nothing straightforward and actually practical.
I'm patiently, but eagerly, looking forward to status.im .
I could export all my Android (Nougat) messages and media, and restore it onto my iPhone (iOS 11).
It was a bit dodgy though - it asked me to install an old (custom?) APK first to export my messages, and the iPhone restore process looked like an actual iOS system restore..
As in it 'hijacked' the UI? I guess its possible that it's using the backup-restore mechanism to get data onto the iPhone.
I wonder if it still works now in iOS 11.
iMessage works with email addresses too.
I suggest using Riot, preferrably self-hosted.
It makes no sense to create a "secure" chat app, and then to force your users to use cellphones, which is the most unsafe technology I can imagine... Why this cellphone fetish?
How did you sign in without a phone number? It's not possible on https://web.telegram.org/#/login.
Unfortunately, unlike the old chat protocols, switching to any other platform means convincing your contacts to use a new platform. They like you and all, but that means they also have to use a special app just to talk with you now.
What the hell are we doing?
You can choose your version when you send the requests
What would it do differently?
Ends up with some friends throwing you a bone and downloading / registering for a new service. Some of them remember to keep it open. Some use it. The rest of their friends don't. But a few of them love you enough to use a special app just for you because you seem to care. <3
Besides, what's more open, as usable and secure?
It's self hostable or you can just login on their Matrix server.
Ah, and no phone number needed.
Obviously, WhatsApp/Facebook would want to avoid a bunch of third party apps connecting to their service. How long until they make changes to make this more difficult/impossible?
This is only useful for real users who want to write custom applications that connect to their phones.
> An UI that is not that technical, but rather starts to emulate the actual WhatsApp Web UI.
No, no, no. This trend of 'Phone UI' chat interfaces on desktop/laptop screens needs to stop. If you are going to all this effort to reverse engineer the protocol, at least make your front end customisable or at the very least IRCish in style.
Do you need a phone running to use this project?
