WhatsApp with BitlBee

Since many people seem to be intersted in using whatsapp with bitlbee, here's a rough untested summary of how to get it working. Please send reports of success or any issues to #bitlbee.

Requirements

• bitlbee-libpurple (see HowtoPurple)

• https://github.com/davidgfnet/whatsapp-purple

• A phone number attached to something that can receive SMS
• A password (see the 'registration' section)

Caveats

• You can't use whatsapp from more than one device simultaneously.

• This might be against the whatsapp TOS, and they might decide to ban your phone number. Your warranty is now void, etc.

• The registration tokens change often, additional security measures are added regularly, so maybe none of this will work.

Registration

You need to get a password to connect. This password is not the IMEI as you might have read (it was, a few years ago), but you need to extract it somehow from a running whatsapp client, or create a new one. At the time of this writing it doesn't seem possible to sniff it, so, alternatives:

• https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup/wiki/yowsup-cli

• https://github.com/shirioko/WART

If you succeed at this step, congratulations. Try not to get too desperate if it goes wrong, you might end up with a huge cooldown period. Check the issue trackers of the relevant tool to see if other people have the same issue, as the registration tokens might have changed.

Putting it all together

The next step is to get whatsapp-purple working in bitlbee, and I hope you can figure that out yourself because I've never done it.

If you want, you can try it first with pidgin, since that's the officially supported way to use whatsapp-purple.