from Hacker News

WhatsApp sends Cease and Desists for apps that use native Android APIs

by mimerme on 7/5/18, 4:48 AM with 106 comments

• by devit on 7/5/18, 9:26 AM

  The real problem here is that after this stunt I'd like to completely stop using Whatsapp and switch to something else instead, but I can't because other people use Whatsapp and communicating with other people is essential to me.

  The problem is there no laws to stop whoever becomes the lucky recipient of such a network effect from doing whatever they want.

  Instead antitrust law needs to be expanded to consider network effect platforms like social network as monopolies on ways of interacting with their users, and restrict them from several behaviors like this one.

• by einarfd on 7/5/18, 1:04 PM

  I wonder what Google thinks about this. If these companies only use standard Android API's, and they get sued over that, that isn't good for Googles platform at all. A reasonable response from Google would be to change their terms for publishing to the Play store, if they don't say it already, that you aren't allowed to sue other app makers, if they only use standard API to interop with your app.

• by pmontra on 7/5/18, 7:07 AM

  > This letter is not a complete list of all of WhatsApp's rights you might have violated.

  Fortunately they added this statement because (IANAL) I believe those developers didn't perform any of the activities listed in the bullet points of the letter.

  However all of third party WhatsApp automation is a gray area. Everybody knows that WhatsApp doesn't welcome it (I really don't know why) and they have the money to litigate, especially because no big business will ever build anything on the top of WhatsApp without a previous explicit consent. For example a bot API. I never understood why they didn't implement one. I hoped that after the FB acquisition they would, an exact copy of the Messenger one, but they still didn't. Now that all the founders left maybe things will change but I wonder what's FB's plan. WhatsApp is bigger than Messenger in many countries and with the EU stance against data sharing between the two companies I wouldn't be surprised if the plan is to move all WhatsApp users to Messenger.

• by tabs_masterrace on 7/5/18, 12:07 PM

  Remember when Instant Messaging protocols used to be open? When there was a multitude of clients for any given service to chose from?

  Now IM has left its early adopter stage and became an integral part of everybody's life, but in doing so we became stuck with 100% proprietary WhatsApp. Not undeserved, it works very well with billions of users, and is probably the most usable IM service ever made.

  But it became so big and "essential", that it doesn't seem right that a large part of human communication is bound exclusively through their apps.

  I think in the long run there would be a real benefit to opening up their protocol.

• by robin_reala on 7/5/18, 6:55 AM

  The legal claims seem spurious at best. The letter provides a list of infringements and claims that each of them is violated. I’ve not used the (claimed) offending apps, but from an overview understanding of how they work it seems like precisely no items from the list would be true.

• by andrewaylett on 7/5/18, 10:34 AM

  Next up: suing Google because "Wear OS" and Android Auto also uses these APIs to allow responses from the watch/car?

  The whole _point_ of implementing these APIs is to allow the user to reply using a different app; replies direct from the notification on the device itself are a hook to encourage developers who don't care about the rich integrations to allow that functionality anyway.

  And that's one of the things I really like about Android: "platform" apps like WearOS don't use private APIs, they use public APIs so other developers can build on platform features. I have seven apps installed that ask for notification access, five I've granted.

• by Rjevski on 7/5/18, 9:06 AM

  The affected developers should “cease and desist” by stopping further development and releasing the code as open-source.

  WhatsApp/Facebook will then have to send C&Ds to hundreds of potentially anonymous contributors if they want any chance of taking the open-sourced app down.

• by fauigerzigerk on 7/5/18, 9:55 AM

  If I understand this correctly then I think Google needs to step in here and defend users of the Android APIs. It can't be that developers are getting sued for nothing more than using these APIs as intended.

• by antpls on 7/5/18, 7:53 AM

  At first, I thought WhatApps wanted to slow down automation and bots because they just don't want people to be helped in their communications (which would be weird, given their mission is to help people to communicate).

  However, after the recent news about spreading misinformation in India which did lead to injustices, I can see how bots may harm uninformed users more than it would help them.

  Shame on WhatApps for not being able to provide an official, controlled automation solution.

• by guessmyname on 7/5/18, 7:05 AM

  > Can’t Talk‘s premise is simple. All it does is automatically reply to people when you aren’t around, making use of the quick reply (RemoteInput) API native to Android. […] It’s a paid application if you want to support more than SMS and calls, such as WhatsApp, Slack, and a lot more.

  > DirectChat is another useful application. It works just like Facebook Messenger’s chat bubbles but it supports a lot of different applications too. It feeds your chats into another window where you can then reply back as well. Its most popular usage was probably with WhatsApp.

  I think the "Cease and Desist" letters are being sent because these two specific apps, unless there are others not mentioned by these article, are making use of APIs that are not directly part of WhatsApp but interact with it in a kind of direct way.

  I wonder if the letters were sent directly to the developers or via Google Play.

• by kartan on 7/5/18, 8:14 AM

  TLDR: Two apps are integrated with Android. WhatsApp is integrated with Android. Facebook wants the integration to stop, so they sue this other apps integrated with Android.

  The solution is easy. Facebook should remove the integration from WhatsApp. Problem solved. If you don't want other apps to extend your functionality, you should not integrate with other systems.

  The reality is that when a behemoth like Facebook tells you to do something and that they know were you live (probably literally), your company is at risk independently of how crazy the claims are.

  Corporations are the new big abusive government. But we can't vote them out.

• by anodari on 7/5/18, 10:23 AM

  In Brazil, everyone uses Whatsapp and companies have been pressured by consumers to offer customer service through this channel. I researched and saw that there are integrated apps, but I do not know what form they are using since for all I know, the API has not yet been made available to everyone.

• by mnm1 on 7/5/18, 7:29 PM

  Here's an idea. When a case like this is thrown out of court, the defendant is awarded 1% of the company's revenues in perpetuity as damages. Or replace that with any decent incentive for asshole companies like FB to pull this kind of shit. There need to be serious negative consequences for abusing the court system and loading it with bullshit cases like this one. There is no agreement here between the two parties. Case dropped. The alternative is fixing our fucked up court system so that it can be used for its intended purposes by non-b/millionaires, but that's highly unlikely to ever happen.

• by test6554 on 7/5/18, 1:45 PM

  What if the problem of auto-messaging is the potential for an infinite loop of message and auto-reply. That could cause a lot of headaches for whatsapp.