Are you one of the 600 million people on WhatsApp? Do you grow tired of having to type all of your messages through your phone? Good news!
There’s now a desktop version.
It’s a web app rather than a native client — and for now, at least, it seems to only play friendly with Google Chrome.
But if you’re ready to dive in, you can find the new web-ready version of WhatsApp right over here…
One weird catch: to log in on the desktop, you have to take a picture of a QR code through WhatsApp on your phone. This is necessary, presumably, because WhatsApp uses your phone number and SMS verifications rather than usernames/passwords. This currently works on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry… but “due to Apple platform limitations” (WhatsApp’s words, there — we’re not sure what limitations they mean), iOS users are left out in the cold.
On the platforms where it works, however, it’s very slick.
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Curiously, it seems as if it’s using your phone for more than just the initial login; note the orange warning in the screenshot below. If your phone dies, so does your WhatsApp web connection.