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whatsapp-rust

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Key features

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Authentication

• QR code pairing - Scan QR code from your phone to authenticate
• Pair code linking - Link using phone number with 8-digit code
• Passkey linking (SHORTCAKE_PASSKEY) - Gate companion linking behind a WebAuthn passkey already registered to the account
• Persistent sessions - Automatic reconnection with session management

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Messaging

• End-to-end encryption - Full Signal Protocol implementation
• One-on-one and group chats - Send and receive messages in any chat type
• Message editing and reactions - Edit sent messages and add reactions
• Quoting/replying - Reply to specific messages with context
• Delivery receipts - Track delivery, read, and played status

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Media handling

• Upload and download - Support for images, videos, documents, GIFs, and audio
• Album messages - Send grouped media albums (multiple images/videos in a single bubble)
• Automatic encryption - Transparent encryption/decryption for all media

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Groups and communities

• Group management - Create, manage, invite, membership approval, and subgroup linking
• Community support - Create communities, link/unlink subgroups, query participants
• Invite links - Generate, reset, and join via invite codes
• Membership controls - Approval mode, member add mode, admin promotion/demotion

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Newsletters

• Create and join - Create newsletters, join by JID or invite code
• Send messages - Plaintext messages and emoji reactions
• Live updates - Subscribe to real-time reaction count changes
• Message history - Fetch newsletter messages with pagination

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Status updates

• Text, image, and video - Post status updates with background colors and fonts
• Privacy controls - Send to all contacts, allow lists, or deny lists
• Revocation - Delete posted status updates

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Voice & video calls

• Incoming and outgoing 1:1 audio and video calls - Interoperates with the official WhatsApp app over 3G/WiFi/5G, including upgrading an audio call to video and back
• Rust audio codec and media transport - You own mic/camera capture and speaker/display playout. Rust handles MLow audio encoding and decoding. It also handles encryption, relay transport, and decryption for both streams. You own H.264 encoding and decoding.
• Pure Rust MLow codec - WhatsApp’s proprietary audio codec; the wacore codec layer is FFI-free and compiles to WASM and embedded targets
• Codec-neutral H.264 video - You hand the library complete Annex-B access units; it owns RTP packetization/reassembly, PLI/FIR keyframe recovery, and encryption — no video codec dependency in wacore or whatsapp-rust
• E2E-SRTP encryption - Call key from the Signal session, HKDF-derived SRTP keys, AES-128-CTR + WARP integrity, for both audio and video
• Sans-IO CallEngine - No owned sockets or threads; the wacore engine is runtime-agnostic and compiles to WASM and embedded (esp32); the Tokio async driver is added by the top-level voip feature (native-only)
• Multi-device aware - Companion answering rekey, sibling dismiss, and offline missed-call surfacing
• Opt-in voip feature - Zero impact on default builds; codec and relay deps not compiled unless opted in

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Contacts

• Phone number lookup - Batch check if numbers are on WhatsApp
• Profile pictures - Fetch preview or full-size profile pictures
• User info - Get LID, status text, business status, and picture IDs

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Presence and chat state

• Online/offline status - Set your presence status
• Typing indicators - Show composing, recording, and paused states
• Blocking - Block and unblock contacts, query blocklist

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Chat actions

• Archive/pin/mute - Organize chats with archive, pin, and mute actions
• Star messages - Star and unstar individual messages
• App state sync - Actions sync across all linked devices

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Profile

• Push name - Set your display name with app state sync
• Status text - Update your “about” text
• Profile picture - Set or remove your profile picture

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Privacy

• Privacy settings - Fetch and set last seen, online, profile, status, and group add visibility
• Disappearing messages - Set default disappearing message duration
• Read receipts - Control read receipt visibility

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Architecture

• Runtime agnostic - Pluggable async runtime, transport, HTTP client, and storage via trait abstractions
• Modular design - Swap any component (Tokio, SQLite, ureq) without changing application code
• WASM-ready - Core protocol library (wacore) has zero runtime dependencies, enabling WebAssembly targets
• SQLite included - Default storage backend with bundled SQLite, easily swappable
• Native plugins - Build-time, type-safe extensions with scoped capabilities and generation-scoped lifecycle ownership behind the opt-in plugins feature. See Native plugins

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Getting started

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Project structure

whatsapp-rust/
├── src/                          # Main client library
├── wacore/                       # Platform-agnostic core (zero runtime deps)
│   ├── binary/                   # WhatsApp binary protocol
│   ├── libsignal/                # Signal Protocol implementation
│   ├── appstate/                 # App state management
│   ├── noise/                    # Noise Protocol handshake
│   └── derive/                   # Derive macros
├── waproto/                      # Protocol Buffers definitions
├── storages/sqlite-storage/      # SQLite backend
├── storages/chat-store/          # Optional chat/message history store
├── transports/tokio-transport/   # Tokio WebSocket transport
├── http_clients/ureq-client/     # HTTP client for media
├── tests/e2e/                    # End-to-end test suite
└── examples/                     # Demo bot (demo.rs) and benchmarks

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Acknowledgements

• whatsmeow - Go implementation
• Baileys - TypeScript implementation