Whatsapp Without Phone

I had stopped using whatsapp because I didn’t want to have it’s proprietary app on my de-googled device.

The Issue

But you see, this application is used by most of my academic professors and other colleages, so I had to somehow use it (without the app on my phone, of course).

So I thought of running it through some android emulator, but didn’t want to natively run it on my linux machine. [No waydroid as I run X11]

Thus I installed Windows 10 through virtual box and then installed bluestacks in it. But bluestacks was not starting properly (issues with virtualization), which I solved via virtualbox settings.

If this still doesn’t work for you, I think you should also enable Virtualization and Hyper-V support from “Turn on windows features” from within your Windows VM.

After this, bluestacks started working normally and I installed whatsapp in it and logged in to my account [A strange thing was that all my chats and groups were gone, but maybe that was because I was logging in after around 1 month].

My next major work was to get whatsapp web working, so that I could use it on my other devices (of course, not going to run the emulator each time I have to use it).

To do so, whatsapp requires web versions to have their QR code scanned by the whatsapp application for login, so I used a usb camera that I had with me, but I got this error when I tried to use the webcam in my Windows VM:

It required a “Webcam Passthrough”, so that the VM instance could access the USB camera.

Steps to allow Webcam Passthrough [Credits]:

1. First install certain extra packages to get stuff working:

   sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-additions-iso virtualbox-ext-pack
   

2. Next, we need to find our webcam details using this:

   VBoxManage list webcams
   

   This should show us a list of (for me only 1) webcam/s attached to your host device.

3. Now finally we need to connect this webcam to enable passthrough. Issue this command, by replacing the word Windows with the name of your VM instance and the .1 with the number that corresponds to your webcam as listed in step 2 (in most cases, it should be .1):

   NOTE: This command must be run only when your windows VM is running.

   VBoxManage controlvm "Windows" webcam attach .1
   

NOTE: If you shutdown or restart your VM, it will loose access to the camera. You need to re-run the step 3 command to get it working.

Conclusion

With this much, my VM was able to detect the webcam and without much difficulty, I was able to register with the whatsapp web version on my devices.

A small caveat though, remember to open the whatsapp in your windows VM every 14 days to avoid getting logged out of your whatsapp web devices.