Heyhey everyone,
I am going to switch from my Synapse instance (back) to Continuwuity in a month. The main reason I’ve been using it is to chat with family who are only on Whatsapp and iMessage (Yes, I tried getting them someplace else. Whatsapp ended up being that other place). Though I’m also in groups on other Matrix instances.
The main annoyances I had with using the bridge until now are:
- I need to open the app every two weeks on my second phone (which tends to get lost when I need it).
- The time my server went out for a couple of days also made me unsure of self hosting a bridge. I don’t mind if I can’t see some support messages for a couple of days, but I do mind not being able to get texts from family.
Compared to just using the app it’s a difficult proposition. But on the other hand I don’t have anything proprietary installed on my phone and I’d like to keep it that way if possible.
There is technically a third option by hosting an iMessage bridge, but I don’t have a spare Mac. And while my second phone is an iPhone, there is no documentation on how to bridge via a 64-bit iPhone. In this case however, there would be no two weeks access requirement.
I’d love to hear you guys’ thoughts and maybe some other way to tackle this!
Cheers!
Edit: Thanks everyone for the help! I’ve heard some awesome suggestions. I opted to keep using the bridge. Apparently you don’t need to open the app to refresh the biweekly timer, just run it in the backgroud. I happen to have a device that is on more than often enough for Whatsapp to refresh that timer in te background.
I run continuwuity and the mautrix-whatsapp bridge. It’s not 100% reliable, but close enough for me. Especially after I moved it from the NAS in my basement to a VPS in some datacenter. I occasionally had some issues with my ISP doing maintenance, a power outage at home… I let WhatsApp run on my kitchen tablet 24/7 so it keeps that 14 day timer running. To my knowledge that’s unavoidable unless you switch WhatsApp Business or something.
And I like Continuwuity way better than Synapse and the ridiculous amount of resources it uses to forward text messages.
But yeah, silently dropping the connection isn’t great at all. I think the only proper solution is to nag people into using a different messenger. Signal is relatively straightforward to use, made for average people and comes with the same functionality as WhatsApp.
I actually mostly use Signal. I got my family to use Signal for a while, but they just ended up sending texts I did not strictly need to see on iMessage. Hence why we eventually settled on Whatsapp
I wish my friends and family did the pre-screening of messages and their importance to me as well 😆 I get important messages and silly memes all mixed in the same group chats, so it’s impossible for me to tell whether I need to pick up my phone.
Haha. Yeah we have a seperate “memechat” for non-serious stuff (which went to iMessage in that Signal period) so I just have that one automatically muted on select hours of the day.
By keeping it open 24/7 do you mean that the app is actively taking screen space or is an unclosed app in the background? I hadn’t actually thought of not swiping the app away after refreshing the timer. And yeah I was looking at OpenWA as well but that’s for businesses.
Background will do. I think even swiping it away is fine, as long as you don’t force-close it. Just pay attention there is some Play store or Aurora store doing automatic app updates. I skipped on the updates and once WhatsApp hadn’t been updated for several months, they closed the connection.
I do have a tablet I use as a glorified recipe book. So that might just do it. Thanks, you’ve been a huge help!