I got banned at some point during or after the holidays when I tried adding someone to a group I've managed for 2 years. I had been using GOS for 2 years prior to getting banned with 0 issues. Now I'm on the same boat as everyone else. I eventually gave up on trying to make whatsapp work on my Pixel, and loaded my account onto an iPhone I have laying around for webdev testing purposes. As soon as I managed to log in (after fighting the code registration not working for 2 days) I got banned like 5 seconds into loading my chats. Once I got unbanned a second time, I managed to set up my account on the iPhone and link my Pixel as companion device.
This had been working for a few weeks, until right now, when I had to send a payment receipt screenshot to a contact (aka very important shit that can't be done off whatsapp because it's a fucking business and they aren't jumping into telegram or signal over a receipt just because I asked nicely), sent it, sent a sticker afterwards, and immediately got banned AGAIN. This might have been due to sending the image from the banking app, or because I sent it at 2-3 AM (I'm a night owl, sue me), I don't know, the antispam banhammer is way too fucking trigger happy and I can't be questioning my everyday life choices every time I want to message someone.
One important note, at least in my case, is that my account has been getting attacked by hackers for MONTHS. They managed to log me out of my account during a trip back in October 2025, and I had to wait to get back into my country to log back in. They could never get past the 2FA Pin, but they could quite easily get registration codes for my account somehow, very VERY frequently (to the point that I think this has affected my ability to get registration codes quickly; I have to wait up to 24 hours between retries). More than a handful of times, the code popped up inside the whatsapp app, but I'm sure they used some sort of SIM spoofing to get SMS codes or something. I'm not sure how else they could consistently get my registration codes and consistently log me out multiple times a week, all the while my calls and SMS capabilities seemingly left untouched an fully working.
Regardless of what hackers on the other side of the world might have been doing to try and get my account, this feels like whatsapp picked a fight with me and just decided to bully me out of their platform, even though my account is fully secured and I have owned it for close to 15 years at this point, on a number I've owned for like 20 years. Not even the companion link works now? I don't understand what to do, how to avoid this. I bought my Pixel 8 Pro specifically to use GrapheneOS. I specifically bought the phone expecting to not have to change phones for 7-8 years, and now this happens? I'm not about to upend my entire setup, which WORKS JUST FINE FOR EVERYTHING ELSE, just because Meta doesn't want me on a more secure phone than what they can abuse and get info out of.
At this point I think we can all agree this problem is not going to be getting fixed, it won't get addressed by Meta and the Graphene team can only do so much about it, it's not their fault Meta has a stick up its ass. We need alternatives to using WhatsApp directly, and if they're already accusing me of using an unofficial app, well I'll make those claims worth their while. I'll gladly take any ideas, even if they mean coding something from scratch. Someone mentioned Beeper, and I know Meta is getting pressured over EU's DMA policy, but are we anywhere there yet? Can we connect to whatsapp through bridges (without requiring a non-GOS phone hidden in a trench coat somewhere)? What about the API requests to the backend from the whatsapp client, has anyone looked into those and tried to reproduce them off-platform? Surely something can be worked out to connect to whatsapp servers without having their client freak out because we're not giving them all our information?