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Is there any closed source android app that you wish had a good open source alternative?
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Matrix!
No, I'm not looking for an alternative. I'm looking for an open source client that let's me talk to folks on WhatsApp.
ah, hopefully with the Digital Markets Act in the EU, reliable bridging to Matrix with E2EE intact will come quickly. You can already bridge (e.g. I run mautrix-whatsapp), but its not in an ideal state
Even with a matrix bridge, you still have to run WhatsApp -- the official closed source client. It doesn't solve that problem
I want a way to not have to run closed source software to communicate with users on WhatsApp
Yup, that's what DMA should solve (edit: or, rather, will solve, when Whatsapp fully complies with it)
A closer analogy would be XMPP since that's what whatsapp is based on.
The best open source client for it is Conversations for Android ($0 on F-Droid, $3 on google play except during christmas when it's $0)
depends what you mean by closer -- by features and ease of use, Matrix is the closest you can get to Whatsapp right now. XMPP is good, though!
What I mean by closer is code-wise. On the backend, WhatsApp literally uses XMPP. The big difference is that WhatsApp also has a few proprietary plugins, and a singular client that uses these and hides away the fact that it's all XMPP.
That’s why it’s less janky & doesn’t take minutes to join a room unlike Matrix. WhatsApp to the XTENSIBLE part of XMPP & extended it in a proprietary direction, but at least you have the option to easily do so with XML.
I don’t know what Matrix is giving users other than the eventual consistency model of chat, but most users don’t need the entire chat history of everything—you could argue it is an anti-feature that makes self-hosting too expensive in comparison & also leads to chat overuse/abuse ala Slack/Telegram/Discord where folks treat it as a forum that you can barely search when you have an account while being authenticated & where messages/topics get easily lost. For instance, you can replace an ’announcements room’ with a Atom feed.
Matrix is kinda janky and unstable
I've been using it as my only form of messaging with most of my contacts for several years, many of whom have little knowledge of technology. It's really not.