Are you one of the 600 million people on WhatsApp? Do you grow tired of having to type all of your messages through your phone? Good news!

There’s now a desktop version.

It’s a web app rather than a native client — and for now, at least, it seems to only play friendly with Google Chrome.

One weird catch: to log in on the desktop, you have to take a picture of a QR code through WhatsApp on your phone. This is necessary, presumably, because WhatsApp uses your phone number and SMS verifications rather than usernames/passwords.

This currently works on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry… but “due to Apple platform limitations” (WhatsApp’s words,— we’re not sure what limitations they mean), iOS users are left out in the cold.

On the platforms where it works, however, it’s very slick.

Curiously, it seems as if it’s using your phone for more than just the initial login. If your phone dies, so does your WhatsApp web connection.





Tech Crunch