Free Clients and Libraries for a more open WhatsApp

Luigys Toro

6 minutes

WhatsApp It is the most used instant messaging platform in the world, we all know it for 2 simple reasons or we have used it or we have been asked if we use it. Without a doubt, this platform has allowed real-time communication to become universal, the amount of advances that have been made in recent times, should make the defenders of Free Software look at this application and learn from its marketing, control of software and especially its update cycle.
 whatsapp

Knowing the importance and impact it has WhatsApp For most people, it is important that we know that from the world of Free Software programs, api, interfaces and even encryption algorithms have been made that have allowed us to get more out of this application that although we would love it if it were free, it is not , but despite that, the communities have insisted on carrying out some works that we will analyze below.

Since a time ago WhatsApp It can be used from your mobile phone and computer, using its already famous WhatsApp Web service, which allows us to scan a QR code from our mobile phone and an interface will automatically open that allows us to see our conversations, send and receive messages and even attach multimedia files, one of the limitations of WhatsApp Web is that the communication comes from the mobile phone, so it must be turned on and connected to the data for it to work. Although Linux lovers can use the WhatsApp Web service through most browsers, there are also several clients that allow us to use WhatsApp from our operating system directly, among the most notable clients for WhatsApp desde linux we have:

  • whatsie:

    This interface for Linux is the one I used daily, it saves me a lot of time, it has all the functionalities of WhatsApp Web, in addition to being able to start when the system starts, it has a spell checker, it has the possibility that the application is always visible and By changing the graphic style, we can add an icon to the bar and even open the links directly, but the main advantage is that it does not force us to have the browser open because it uses the Web App concept. whatsie

To enjoy whatsie desde linux We can use the methods below according to your favorite distro.

Ubuntu, Debian (debpackage):

  1. Download whatsie-xxx-linux-arch.deb
  2. Double click and install, or we can run the following command in the terminal dpkg -i whatsie-x.x.x-linux-arch.deb
  3. We run the application and start to enjoy, the application will not update automatically but we can check if there is an update or not.

We can also use aptitude in the following way:

gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-keys 1537994D
gpg --export --armor 1537994D | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/aluxian/deb stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install whatsie

Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat (RPM package):

  1. Download whatsie-xxx-linux-arch.rpm
  2. Double click and install, or we can run the following command in the terminal rpm -ivh whatsie-x.x.x-linux-arch.rpm
  3. We run the application and start to enjoy, the application will not update automatically but we can check if there is an update or not.

You can also use yum:

sudo wget https://bintray.com/aluxian/rpm/rpm -O /etc/yum.repos.d/bintray-aluxian-rpm.repo
sudo yum install whatsie.i386     # for 32-bit distros
sudo yum install whatsie.x86_64   # for 64-bit distros

Arch Linux, Manjaro (AUR):

  1. We simply run the following command in the terminal yaourt -S whatsie
  2. We run the application and start to enjoy, the application will not update automatically but we can check if there is an update or not.

  • French

    Probably most of us know Franz, the free messaging application that allows us to integrate all our chat systems in a single application, it is undoubtedly a great job, open Franz and start seeing the chats of our friends, clients and acquaintances in one platform obviously saves us a lot of time. Franz currently allows us to integrate WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupM, skype pe among others. franz

To install Franz in our favorite distribution we must download the corresponding .tar.gz file, compile and enjoy

Franz for 32 bits

Franz for 64 bits

Arch Linux, Manjaro (AUR):

  1. We simply run the following command in the terminal yaourt -S franz --noconfirm
  2. We run the application and begin to enjoy.

For developers we also have something prepared, for some time a couple of great libraries have been released to interact with WhatsApp, one in Php and the other in Python.

  • Chat APIs

    It is a very powerful library made with Php and that allows us to communicate with WhatsApp services, it contains various methods that allow us to connect and access WhatsApp, the use of events, sending and receiving messages, use of emoji, reset password, visualization profile, last viewing time, subscription, create and manage groups, migrate number, database storage, end-to-end encryption compactness, among others. It has a wide documentation and it is developed following international standards.  

    With Chat APIs you can make many applications and you can direct it to various services, many platforms already use it to be used in third-party applications, for example in marketing applications. To enjoy Chat Api you can download it from the official repository. A good use of this library can be seen in the following video

  • yowsup

    Python lovers can enjoy this very good library based on Chat APIs and that has been evolving very fast. Yowsup is a Python library that allows you to create applications that use the WhatsApp service. Yowsup has been used to create an unofficial WhatsApp client for the Nokia N9 through the Wazapp project which has over 200000 users, as well as another unofficial full-featured client for the Blackberry 10.

Yowsup installation is straightforward.

  • Requires Python 2.6+, or Python 3.0+
  • The required Python packages are: python-dateutil yowsup-cli : argparse

Install using setup.py to satisfy all python dependencies.

sudo python setup.py install

We can also easily install as follows

# apt-get install python python-dateutil python-argparse

Then we clone the Yowsup repository

git clone https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup.git

Already downloaded, we unzip it with unzip master.zip and we access the src / directory, inside there will be a file called "config.example" we can copy it to a new file to configure it with our data as follows # cp config.example whatsapp_config.txt. El nombre del archivo solo es una sugerencia.

Within the same directory it is necessary to give execution permissions to the “yowsup-cli” file as follows

# chmod +x yowsup-cli

It is important to note that there are totally free alternatives to WhatsApp that are very good and that in some cases, like Telegram, I believe without fear of being wrong that it is superior. Regardless of this, I hope you can now extend a better use of this application that perhaps is not everyone's favorite, but that in some cases it is necessary to use.