Posted by dotcoma 1 day ago
What are our options today to chat with WhatsApp users without using their app?
I have been building it, piece by piece. Some pieces have been recently featured (last week) in trusted security publications:
Safecloud: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
Safebox and Safebots are coming too: https://safebots.ai/about
You won’t need to take anyone’s word for it. And in fact, end-to-end encryption will become unnecessary.
What does attestation have to do with this? Attestation means not giving me root to my own device. No thanks.
We need something universal, like email, but better engineered.
As for the client — the app store on iOS doesn’t allow reproducible builds.
Telegram tried something close for years, which is how I know they care: https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds
But it doesn’t matter because the metadata is equally important and useful to get you. And anyway, end-to-end encryption can be banned, or compromised by a new app update, or secretly removed via a backdoor for some, if you pressure one guy (eg @durov in France, or his team every time they pass through an airport). Read this article — it was my response to Moxie Marlinspike (of Signal fame) years ago when he was skeptical of decentralization:
https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...
> In transit. Between two online devices. With no cloud backup. With no business accounts. With no Meta AI features. With no linked devices. With no law enforcement warrant for metadata.
> Under every other condition — which is how most people actually use WhatsApp — the story changes dramatically.
Smells a lot like slop so I'll pass, no thanks.
Then for some reason WhatsApp has far more critical no-click or 1-click exploits than Telegram, which has 30 global employees? Huh? There's several thousand working on WhatsApp. Telegram has more features, too. WhatsApp has less surface area, more employees, more exploits.
A bit like how there's much more malware for Windows than there is for Linux
I suspect that smaller teams are, on average, more likely than larger ones to write secure software.
Avoid.