Permission [per-mish-uhn]
noun.
: authorization granted to do something; formal consent
Quick Recap:
Stay in touch w/ Friends
We are building a simple v0.1 of BetterFriend app by using WhatsApp Chatbot to remind people their loved one’s birthday with AI.
Meta / Facebook / Whatsapp
True Story - I didn’t touch Facebook.com for over 5 years and I lost my account forever due to a security bug they have (still have) that doesn’t allow you to reset your password / 2 Factor Security.
Luckily for me, my best friend who I worked with 10 years ago at Facebook, left the company around the same time (2017), and rejoined Whatsapp late last year.
For all employees, there’s an internal tool inside of Facebook to help their family and friends to get faster support on certain things such as losing an account / forgetting a password / getting hacked. I knew this was my only hope knowing how many requests they get globally from more than 2 Billion users they have across 5 different platforms (Messenger, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp).
Even with this shortcut, it took us at least 8 tries of back and forth until the support team understood the bug / the problem, and they couldn’t fix it - they had to create a manual work around to make it work.
Why did I go through so much trouble to get my Facebook.com back? No one really uses it anymore besides going on Facebook Marketplace. But unfortunately, I needed it to get access to Whatsapp Chatbot API. They demanded that I have to have a Facebook account first.
Approval
The story didn’t end there.
In order to get the Whatsapp API approval, one has to verify a business LLC. I’m lucky to already have one in place for a long time - this went swiftly. It was approved after 1-2 days.
But they didn’t give me Whatsapp Access. Why?
They referred me to their policy:
https://business.whatsapp.com/policy
The main reason was that my website stated, Betterfriend.xyz does not show enough information about how I will use the Whatsapp Chatbot that will comply with the rules of their policy.
I looked around online and there’s not a lot of information on what I need for the website in order to receive approval, and they don’t seem to care for a small experimental startup project like mine.
There are also limiting your ability to interact with your customers / users. These are the only 4 kinds of messages / interactions you can have. They restrict formats /
They also charge per message you send - this was changed on July 1st 2025 - about 1 month ago:
https://business.whatsapp.com/products/platform-pricing
Overall, the biggest takeaway that everyone should have reading this is that:
You don’t own your customer base when you build on another platform.
This stays true when we build on Apple, Android, Microsoft, Tiktok, Instagram, Linkedin, X.com. At any moment these platforms can say you violate their policy and shut down your business. Regardless of how well your are doing or how much value you are adding to your customers lives. They have full control.
As someone that have been investing and building open-source technologies in blockchain, I hate this. I don’t think it’s fair, and I believe there needs to be an alternative. Or at the minimum give users options. Substack for example allows me to move my subscribers to another platform if I ever want to, and gives me a lot of control. Some platforms are much more friendly than others.
Governments are now intervening for these types of tyranny and monopolistic control. Apple recently lost a HUGE lawsuit and they are now forced to allow developers use different payment systems inside of the apps. This means app developers don’t have to give Apple 30% of all in app purchases. Huge win for small developers and Gaming Studios.
Moving Forward
Ultimately, the process of learning how to build the v0 of BetterFriend is already giving me a lot of value. Since the v1 goal has always been moving to a stand-alone app that allows End-to-End Encryption just like 1Password / Whatsapp / Signal, I’m less concerned about the Whatsapp API access at this point.
I’ve decided to use Telegram chatbot API instead to test the flow and use it for user research for building v1. I found Telegram to be much more open and less restrictions on how I interact with users - similar to if I had my own app.
https://core.telegram.org/bots/tutorial
There are quite a few of tutorials that show how to set up a telegram bot easily for anyone who wants to learn, so I won’t make a video:
If I find any part of moving forward with Telegram hard while building it into VScode and Github, I’ll make a note and maybe make a video of it if you find it helpful. Please do comment and let me know.
This should give me the flexibility to do what I want.
Back to building.
See ya tomorrow!
(⚡️BetterFriend Project Day 8 - 38)