WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned mobile messaging app, might be landing on desktops in the near future.
While WhatsApp rose to popularity as a mobile messaging app that uses the smartphone’s SIM card to authenticate, and it’s stuck to mobile devices so far, that might be changing soon, according to an AndroidWorld.nl report.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1624679,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"mobile,","session":"A"}']Earlier this week, messaging app Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, said in an interview that WhatsApp has tried to poach his web app developer, raising suspicions that WhatsApp might be working on its own. And yesterday, the Dutch blog AndroidWorld.nl discovered thatthe code in version 2.11.471 of the Android app (but not the newest one) has mentions of “WhatsApp Web,” logging in and out of computers, plus status and latest activity tracking in web sessions.
It will be interesting to watch, is how WhatsApp handles authentication since it uses the mobile device’s SIM instead of a Facebook login, for example. According to the WhatsAPI team, you will login with your WhatsApp account on the web using OAuth. The web client will send a request to your mobile client, and then log you in once you’ve accepted it on your phone. You will access this through the https://web.whatsapp.com address, which currently requests a Google account to log in.
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