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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters ISP Internet Service Provider NAS Network-Attached Storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
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I bought a dutch sim card (no registration) and a used android phone thats not linked to me to activate it. Then I made an whatsapp account with that number and I am only accessing it via whatsapp web on my graphene OS phone on a special profile with no acceas to my contacts. That profile also uses a dutch mullvad vpn server thats always on.
I am not dutch and don’t live in the Netherlands.
This guy is Zucc’s biggest nightmare.
Actually our setup isn’t that different. I do have everything running behind Mullvad, including my server with the bridge on it. I also have a seperate, rarely used phone number. I don’t have Whatsapp on my GOS device though
genius
I tried hosting the bridge and it was hard to set up and unreliable. Right now I have WhatsApp installed on Graphene OS in a work profile so it doesn’t get access to all my contacts, only the ones I had to specifically add in this profile. In theory you can restrict it even more using labels but managing this was a pain in the ass.
WhatApp will still know who are you talking to and you still have to run their app somewhere so in my opinion setting up the bridge just so I don’t have their app on my phone is simply not worth the hassle.
My experience is the opposite, WhatsApp is my most reliable bridge requiring exactly zero intervention to reauthorize or troubleshoot.
Your right you still have to have the app because of how it works. But you can’t bridge the calls anyways, I just have message notifications off.
Yeah, this is a tricky one. I was in the same situation. I set up an Android VM with just Whatsapp and had the bridge on Matrix. That allowed me to talk to my family. For a while… Then Meta banned my phone number.
That was actually a good thing since now the Whatsapp option was permanently off the table. We installed Element on their devices and now they use that to communicate with me. They still use Whatsapp to talk among themselves though. Can’t really blame them for that since even government and most businesses use Whatsapp in the Netherlands.
By the way, regarding the iMessage bridge, can’t you run macOS in a VM? The kholia repo makes it pretty easy to set up.
A fair amount of smaller businesses in Belgium also primarily use Whatsapp.
A VM is difficult for me since I only have a spare quad core laptop from almost a decade ago. So I’m sceptical on whether it will be able to virtualise an OS on top. And the bridges are hosted on a Zimablade. So I have my doubts there as well. Though I can definitely give it a spin in my free time, you never know.
I do have my main computer where I do run VMs often, but I doubt my partner will be fine running that noisy thing overnight though.
Ideally I would be running an iMessage bridge like you’re suggesting. Unfortunately I don’t have time to get it to work on my iPhone since the maumium docs mention it’s possible, but haven’t made a guide for it.
I’ll definitely keep the VM thing in mind if I ever decide to replace the Zimablade. I doubt my family will let go of their Apple devices any time soon anyway.
Thanks, I’ve really been appreciating everyones ideas here!
If I remember correctly, Apple makes it really hard to bridge iMessage and they implemented some sort of hardware check and even disallowed older versions of MacOS or so. As usual, they really like to lock people into their ecosystem.
P.S.: something is wrong with that link you shared.
Oops, not sure how I managed to mess that up that badly!
I got my family using Signal. Then I stopped responding to them anywhere else. If it’s important they’ll do it.
WhatsApp is and always will be annoying to use this way, and that’s intentional. They don’t want you using it this way.
Lastly you can use RCS (Google Messages) to chat with iMessage users, but here you’re just trading Meta spying for Google spying.
Yes, my family sent me important messages on Signal for the couple of months we used it, but that was it. The issue lied with the other kinds of messages that I just didn’t receive anymore. I’m happy enough we got on a platform that is at the very least e2ee and where those other kinds chats still continue. Though I’m aware that metadata is being shared that wouldn’t be if we used Signal.
I used beeper for that because it enables you to choose between hosting the bridge on their server, hosting the bridge on your computer but using their homeserver which makes things way easier or just using the on device bridge in their app with no server (except iMessage because apple immediately patched every attempt of theirs so now you need a Mac to bridge it)
The WhatsApp issue that you have to open the original app every few days is unavoidable sadly.
Yeah I thought about using it too. The two bridges are also developed by them. I wouldn’t have minded using their app instead, but I don’t have the Play Store on my phone (I’m on GOS). They don’t offer a regularly updated apk on their site like Whatsapp does either.
Still thanks for the suggestion though!
I wouldn’t have minded using their app instead, but I don’t have the Play Store on my phone (I’m on GOS)
Any reason why you aren’t just using the Aurora store?
Mainly because it’s really difficult to make a Google account when they suspect you’re a bot.
Sorry, I’m confused here, why do you need to make a Google account?
Oh don’t you need a Google account to get the apks on Aurora?
No, you can use your own account if you like but the “default” usage is to log in anonymously
I run a few bridged, with Continuwuity.
First of all, great choice. It works perfectly and it’s very light on resources. Totally different from Synapse, specially for few users (1 user in my case) instances.
The wa bridge works just fine, but I wouldn’t rely on in for critical messages. Actually in two years I never lost a message, but … Well … My wife would NOT like that I lose even one message from her in real time.
Here my experience https://wiki.gardiol.org/5-matrix-hosting (personal wiki, no ads, no monetization)
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!
I’m running the WhatsApp bridge and it is very reliable for me, probably the most reliable of all the bridges I tried.
if not for the forced installation of the official client, it would really be neat. with a telegram bridge i also have good experience, only a single hiccup, years ago.
i have Whatsapp in a frozen shelter to starts it every two weeks.
recently i was thinking to have a second home server just for bridges, you should be able to use it federated. but didn’t try it yet.
main point for me was the sheer amount of ghost users.
