tomtau / superbasic-im

web-proxy for WhatsApp Web that works on dumbphones

SuperBasic IM: a web-proxy for WhatsApp Web that works on dumbphones

Problem

Feature phones typically don't support WhatsApp natively, but they have a basic web browser.

Solution

SuperBasic IM acts as a proxy between the fully featured WhatsApp Web and dumbphone web browsers.

Instructions

Build

npm install
npm run build

Lint

npm run lint

Run

cd dist
node index.js init
node index.js

Current features

Supported

• Sending and receiving text messages
• Sending and receiving files
• Downloading VCard of any WhatsApp contact
• Emoji conversions (from emoji to their textual representation for display in dumbphone web browsers)

Unsupported

• Audio and video calls
• Instant notifications
• Locations
• Group chat management
• Polls

Contributing

The contribution policy we follow is the Collective Code Construction Contract (C4). For basic details, please see the contribution instructions.

Current problems

As mentioned in the contribution instructions, please open a GitHub issue first (if it doesn't exist) to describe the problem and reference this issue in your PR.

• Problem: sent or received media files may not be playable on the end device
  • Solution: introduce media re-processing on the server for common dumbphone player formats
• Problem: contacts may wait for a reply for too long
  • Solution: add an opt-in auto-reply to remind contacts to call or SMS if they don't receive a reply to their urgent message
• Problem: textual emoji input is cumbersome
  • Solution: add conversions from common ASCII emojis
• Problem: textual display of emojis is not nice
  • Solution: add an opt-in conversion to <img> tags linking freely-licensed emoji image sets