Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spijdar | Hacker News Reader

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I'm in the same boat with WhatsApp -- though I got a pinephone anyway, because an open, battery powered arm64 computer with USB-C and displayport out is awesome enough to justify it personally.

A couple months ago I went through the hoops of getting anbox set up and working (which I confess involved a lot of mucking around with containers and package versions) and it was .. better than I expected?

WhatsApp and several apps besides installed and opened up fine, and first impressions were that it was surprisingly smooth, given how positively ... anemic the Pine's SoC is. Not pleasant, but definitely usable.

Unfortunately at the time, a bug in the software keyboard and wayland meant that all keyboard input was mangled, so I could never get as far as actually setting up whatsapp and actually testing it.

I remember seeing a month or so ago that Purism apparently fixed the bug in their software keyboard, so now it should work? I've been out of the country though, and haven't tested it yet.

There's still some small keyboard issues left to fix I think but the main thing is I don't think notifications will be possible (especially if they rely on Google Play services).

There is a WhatsApp app on KaiOS (the FirefoxOS successor) which I think must be a PWA so I wonder if that could be repurposed to run on the PinePhone.

An involved solution can be to set a Matrix bridge up for most services, including WhatsApp.

The downside are:

1. You have to host your Matrix server, so not everybody will be happy about it, or able to do so;

2. This relies on reverse-engineering the whatsApp web API, and is against WhatsApp TOS, you might get banned

3. You need another device with WhatsApp installed (an old android phone or a VM works fine).

Personally, this is the main reason why I refuse to use any of these proprietary apps, and I make this clear to my friends.

On the upside, if you go that route, you can go the extra mile and bridge facebook messenger, discord, telegram, and others to your Matrix account, and control everything on the go from a single app. I'm planning to work on push notifications for the Linux phone platform :)

4. Text only

Advantage of anbox approach is that it is the WhatsApp app, so audio/video calls (in theory) work too.

Matrix and bridges is cool though, I would like to set that up, it just unfortunately doesn't cover every use.

Ahhh yeah, I hadn't considered that. Hmmm.

The KaiOS app looks interesting. It seems like they just repurposed the regular web version of WhatsApp, based on its limitations (no voice/video calling). It's a shame they can't just use local storage and let you use that by itself in a browser (without an android/ios device), but, oh well.

Sounds pretty promising, thanks! Can you expand slightly on the SoC being 'anaemic'? Slow in general, or just to start up?

The PinePhone is not 'fast'. It is however not 'slow' per se either. It's fine for running most apps, but things like Firefox take a while to launch.

Still, the fact I can just drop any Linux aarch64 binary on it and run it without restrictions makes it very much worth it.

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