watomatic VS whatsapp

Watomatic (version 26): Auto reply bot for WhatsApp, FB Messenger and more soon

So, basically I know of watomatic but it requires having Messenger already installed on my phone which is not ideal for me.

I recommend Watomatic it's also in F-droid

View release notes on Telegram, Twitter, Github

Get it on: watomatic.app

Contributors like you make this app possible. Please check this link to find ways you can help: https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic/#support

> wish I could convince the few people i talk to on there to use something else

You can use Watomatic to give these people an auto-reply each time they send you a message, and tell them about the better alternative you prefer to communicate with.

https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic

Part of the code that sends a reply: NotificationService.java#L62-L97

Linking my previous answer from Github: https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic/issues/95#issuecomment-802577982

Get Watomatic here: git.io/watomatic

The best you can do now is run whatsapp apk on an emulator or spare device, then auth that with the matrix bridge, then you can avoid needing to use whatsapp clients on daily drivers. Works decently well: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

For WhatsApp, there's a thing called 'bridges' that can link your WhatsApp chats to other chat services that you can access from the device. One example is this bridge that bring chats to open-sourced Matrix protocol, which you can use Hydrogen browser interface to access on the phone. Another bridges to a Discord server that might suit well with this community-made interface.

I suggest you to take a look at matrix and its bridges, like Mautrix Whatsapp. If you don't have competence / time to setup a matrix server, Element Matrix Services host it for you, and you can use WhatsApp, telegram and signal all with a client, without tracking or shitty things from fb

I use it as a one-stop-shop for messaging. I setup a Synapse server ~5 years ago and since then have convinced many of my close family and friends to join my server (or another). Now many of the folks I want to chat with are regular users of Matrix. For some of my stone-age friends that are still on WhatsApp, I run a bridge [1] so that I don't need to look beyond my Matrix client to see WhatsApp messages. For other random SMS messages, I use the dated SmsMatrix [2] to push text messages so I can see/reply from Matrix. Beyond that, I also use Matrix to connect to several open source communities (e.g. Mailu.io [3]).

1. https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

you might be looking for this? https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp/blob/master/example-config.yaml

One option could be to have an old phone tuning android WhatsApp and enable the multi-device beta to use that for web access and access on that other phone, although I don't know if they support the multi device feature either. If you're somewhat technical you could also use an android VM instead of a physical phone, and if you're comfortable with self hosting docker you can use the matrix whatsapp bridge to use WhatsApp without having to install it on your device. https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp and https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy