this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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When was this?
I've been using WA through a matrix bridge over a year, and I don't think I've opened the WA app since setting it up. I do have to keep it installed, and allow it to run in the background.
It, or my matrix app, doesn't seem to significantly drain my battery more than normal.
Is the once every two weeks thing an old requirement? I've never needed to deal with something like that.
This summer? I disabled the WA app on my phone, though, so there was no background activity.
My matrix app (an Element fork) had several bridges and multiple chats, I feel like they were all synching in the background. I haven't noticed that when I was at home, but when I was camping, battery going from 100% in the evening down to 70% in the morning was a problem.
How did that even work at all? All activity goes THROUGH the WA app. WhatsApp only allows one real client to be connected, all other clients (other devices with the app linked to the first device, bridges, whatsapp web sessions, etc. they all still go through your "main device"). If you turn your "main" phone with the whatsapp app off, for example, all others stop working.
Looking it up, the bridge connection expires without activity at least every fourteen days to keep your account active in general. As long as you allow the app to run (which it has to do anyway, because that's how WA works) it'll do that on it's own I think, no need to open it every fourteen days. Or at least, I've never had to. My bridge connection is literally over a year old, and I've definitely gone months without opening the actual WA app in that time.
I run my own instance and bridges.
I use fluffychat on mobile. Though I also have element installed as fluffy doesn't support all message types, and has some bugs despite the nicer (imo) UI.
As for the battery drain of element, that's something you'll have to look into yourself. One of my own qualms with matrix atm is that there's no really excellent mobile client for it... It's all kinda meh. There's element which is feature complete but has a bunch of issues, or there's stuff like fluffy, which is nicer, but not feature complete, and still has issues.
The official app doesn't need to be running constantly. It only needs to connect to Meta's servers once every 14 days.
The Mautrix-Whatsapp bridge will send a notification couple of days in advance to warn you if the main device hasn't been active.
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