Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

When can I send messages from a PC running Python?

WhatsApp has an official API you can use already.

https://pypi.org/project/whatsapp-python/

That is not official, unmaintained since November 2024, and only applicable for the business API. It wouldn't allow someone to create a WhatsApp client for a non-Android/iOS platform.

>It wouldn't allow someone to create a WhatsApp client for a non-Android/iOS platform.

This is moving the goal posts.

The goal post was moved already because I said "when can I send messages" and not "when can my business send messages". Anyway, thanks for the link.

Looks like it is an API for the WhatsApp Business Platform.

(So not free, not for consumers)

https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messa...

Hopefully - never ever ever ever ever.

I do not want spam.

This is why iMessage is much better than SMS - there is an implicit cost to send. This is why there is 100x (my experience) iMessage spam than SMS spam. Easy to send messages -> spam

> better than SMS - there is an implicit cost to send

Funnily enough, people being charged per SMS but being allowed to send as much messages as they need on apps like WhatsApp is exactly why SMS/MMS is barely used on a large scale outside of North America.

I rarely receive any spam on my phone. WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal do have the occasional obvious bot, but all apps make it trivial to block and get rid of any of them.

It’s already possible to make WhatsApp bots, if the API was official they could moderate it better if anything so I don’t see how it would help with spam

All phone and internet services in the EU are connected to your personal identity document, similar to China. If you send spam, the police come to your house.

And this why there is no phone spam… oh wait…

In a roundabout way, you can.

Today, I could write a Python script to connect to my Matrix Synapse server and send a message to rooms bridged to WhatsApp via the `mautrix-whatsapp` bridge.

Despite the opt in limitation, I wonder if this interop capability will allow a bridge that doesn't require you to install whatsapp apk on a real device (unfortunately signal has the same problem). I fortunately kept an old android whose sole purpose is to keep these 2 apps installed. Not ideal, but works well.

Even better if we could ditch the phone number requirement. Many have said to me things like "I use whatsapp not SMS because I am not American", but of course everyone on WhatsApp uses SMS. To stay logged into WhatsApp you necessessarily must have an SMS enabled non-VOIP phone number that you are regularly paying a telecom provider for to receive auth codes.

You can just that a working script is run by crooks (and is not public)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com