Hubot is a fantastic chat bot for automating parts of your life. It’s widely used by developer teams, but I wanted to run an instance when exchanging messages with my friends and family. I tested several chat apps, and eventually got Hubot working with Telegram. Here’s what I’ve learnt about running Hubot with smartphone messaging.
In my social circles, WhatsApp is the clear winner by usage. To my disappointment, there’s no official API available for WhatsApp.
In spite of this, there’s Yowsup and WhatsAPI. WhatsApp is basically a modified XMPP protocol, and intrepid open source developers have reverse-engineered it.
However, WhatsApp has a history of raising legal objections (2012, 2014) to third-party implementations. Whilst I believe this is entirely legal in the UK, I wasn’t interested in writing code that could result in legal threats. To make matters worse, if WhatsApp don’t support an official API, they could in principle change it at any moment.
Kik
I started by looking at popular alternatives to WhatsApp, so I decided to try Kik. Kik provides a great client on both Android and iOS with all the group chat features we’ve come to expect from WhatsApp.
Kik has usernames, rather than finding people through phone numbers, but account creation is very lightweight.
Kik does provide an API. However, it’s entirely targeted at developers building webapps within their client. Whilst there exist spam bots on the Kik platform there doesn’t seem to be an API for building your own chat bots. This is ironic when all new Kik users get the official Kik bot added as a default contact.
Jabber / XMPP
After two failures with proprietary services, I tried setting up Jabber instead. This is can be labour intensive.
I installed the excellent ejabberd on a personal server. Ubuntu’s packages work out of the box, but they’re v2.1.10, which dates from late 2011.
Jabber is an extremely extensible protocol: most of the features you will want are optional extras. As a result, you need to ensure your server and clients all support the XMPP extensions you plan to use. This can be tricky: it’s not always clear which extensions different clients and servers support. I was also caught out by some extensions which require no support from the server at all, just client support.
Finding good smartphone Jabber clients was harder than setting up a server, especially when you require group chat (called ‘conferences’ in XMPP). For Android, Conversations is excellent. For iOS, I never found a good client that supported group chat and push notifications. It turns out this is almost impossible to implement on iOS.
Jabber is a chat protocol designed for computers, not smartphones. Jabber has poor support for contact discovery (WhatsApp just uses phone numbers) and fairly long usernames. Its support for sharing images is weak, requiring both clients to be online at the same time. The general Jabber design seems to be centred around users logging in, chatting, then logging out. A smartphone-centric design is different: I expect to be always connected, receive push notifications, and for my client to sync when I’ve been out of service.
If I were looking for a chat protocol for a team sitting in front of laptops, I would seriously look at Jabber. As a WhatsApp alternative, I don’t think it’s suitable today.
Telegram
Telegram is another popular WhatsApp alternative, but includes a documented, open API. There are established open source implementations, and even the official clients are open source!
The Telegram clients on Android and iOS are both excellent, providing almost exactly the same functionality of WhatsApp.
Setting up a Hubot instance is a little time-consuming, but works very well. There’s a Hubot adapter for Telegram and I’ve written a step-by-step setup guide. You will need a fresh telephone number for your bot (Twilio is ideal for this), the latest version of tg and then you can configure your Hubot as normal.
Final Thoughts
Smartphone messaging has yet to consolidate: there are many competing protocols with no clear winners yet. Protocols tend to compete on availability of clients (Android/iOS/Windows Phone/Blackberry/web) and featureset, so API availability is not a differentiating factor. However, hackable protocols will grow a larger ecosystem, which is a great help when developing a new chat app.
So, I’d recommend Telegram today. If you’re using chat bots on your smartphone, I’d love to hear from you.
Once you’re up and running, the whole Hubot ecosystem is available to you. There are ~800 Hubot packages on npm and ~450 scripts included in hubot-scripts. Hubot is easy to extend if there’s something missing. Give it a try!