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Cloudkibo / WhatsApp

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Evaluate Twilio as a development option. #101

Open jekram opened 6 years ago

jekram commented 6 years ago

https://www.twilio.com/docs/sms/whatsapp/api#sending-notifications

Evaluate Twilio as a development option.

The key criteria are the following:

1) How much Twillo API is compatible with WhatsApp API (We can build a gateway code so we pretend to call WhatsApp and it Calls Twillo)

2) What would be the work effort?

This is a high priority and three of you should spend time today and create a discussion document that we would review tomorrow.

jekram commented 6 years ago

Let me know if I need to sign up as part of this analysis

sojharo commented 6 years ago

I have gone through the API and also discussed this with Asad and Dayem. From features perspective, Twillio API has 1-1 messaging but not group messaging.

Technically it can be our competitor if besides allowing the API, it also gives dashboard like we do.

They are providing a sandbox so that developers can easily prototype our app and test it before going to production. WIth sandbox, they have their own list of phone numbers from which we can choose the phone number for us. These twilio numbers in sandbox can be used to send messages to whatsapp numbers.

In order to send messages from sandbox to whatsapp numbers, we need to have these numbers join sandbox. Once the numbers join sandbox only then they can receive messages from us.

We can test some of our app logic with twilio as it gives us the API that we can call to send messages and then see those messages appearing on recipients phone. However, testing with this can also be little expensive as each message sent through twillio sandbox costs a certain amount according to their following pricing model.

https://www.twilio.com/whatsapp/pricing/us

In order to go to production, they ask us to enable our twillio number with Whatsapp. We would need to send request in Whatsapp console provided by twillio. Then the request to whatsapp would be done by them. Once our twillio number is approved, then we would again apply for whatsapp enabled i.e. our twillio number would be whatsapp enabled or in other words our twillio number besides sending sms, will be able to send WhatsApp messages.

Currently, they are not allowing non-twillio numbers and here is what they have said regarding this on their documentation:

"Currently, we are unable to enable WhatsApp on non-Twilio numbers; support for this is coming soon and we will update these docs once available."

Once twillio approved us as whatsapp enabled, then we would need to create facebook business manager id and give that id to twillio. Twillio would use that to talk to Whatsapp on behalf of us. they haven't spoken about this but I think they would handle the docker work for us behind the scenes.

As per your suggestion, we can use it for our own testing and development purpose but not as business solution.

There was not very much interesting information that we can create a discussion document on this. Most of the times they were just explaining whatsapp business API in easy words. It clarified some of our concepts from whatsapp documentation. We would add slides in deck to discuss on this tomorrow.