WhatsApp Desktop, Unofficial Desktop Client Released
WhatsApp Desktop A free and Open Source unofficial desktop client for Mac, Windows and linux has been released. And it works beautifully.
The website states that this is NOT an official product. It is just a wrapper for WhatsApp Web. According to the disclaimer:
This project does not attempt to reverse engineer the WhatsApp API or attempt to reimplement any part of the WhatsApp client. Any communication between the user and WhatsApp servers is handled by WhatsApp Web itself; this is just a native wrapper for WhatsApp Web, more akin to a browser than any WhatsApp software.
The WhatsApp logo, the WhatsApp brand colour and the 3 images used in the "Simple. Personal. Real Time Messaging." section of my website are owned by WhatsApp and not by me. whatsapp-desktop.com, DISCLAIMER.txt
Install
To install it on Linux, you need to download the deb files which at the time of writing is at version 1.1.0.
- wget https://github.com/Aluxian/WhatsApp-Desktop/releases/download/v1.1.0/UnofficialWhatsApp_linux64.deb
- sudo dpkg -i UnofficialWhatsApp_linux64.deb
For Mac and Windows, go to the download page. After installation this is what I got to see:
Features
On top of the WhatsApp standaard features(Group chats, Send photos & videos, Share locations), the desktop client also has a set of features you might enjoy.
- Badge with the number of notifications in the dock/taskbar (OS X and Windows)
- Auto-launch on OS startup (OS X, Windows)
- Native notifications (all platforms)
- System tray icon (OS X, Windows)
- Open links in browser or new window
- Preferences in the right-click context menu (or menu bar for OS X, tray menu for Windows)
Conclusion
This seem to work, minor bugs here and there but acceptable. Due not, that this is still usage of the web.whatsapp, so you still need to have a working WhatsApp on your phone.