Watomatic may disappear from the Play Store

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Many of you are familiar with the application Watomatic also thanks to our article from a few years ago. For those who don't remember it or for those who have never heard of it, we'll refresh your memory: it's an application for Android that allows you to automatically reply to messages received on WhatsApp. It is useful on many occasions and especially if you intend to detach yourself from WhatsApp: in this way anyone who writes to you will receive an automatic message from you where perhaps you can tell them that you would prefer to be written to Signal.

Having therefore made these necessary premises, the news regarding Watomatic is unfortunately quite serious and sad. The developer of this application, Deekshith Allamaneni, has in fact received a Copyright infringement by Meta. You can find the letter at this address and was entirely posted by the developer himself.

Watomatic may disappear from the Play Store

The official complaint requests the removal of Watomatic due to the fact that the application starts with letters WA (used by WhatsApp to identify itself as a brand) and it is an application that works through WhatsApp so it can be confused for an official application and should be deleted.

We're not lawyers but if things were just like this then it should be enough to delete the application and reload it under another name (on Mastodon they suggest an AnswerAutomatic). In this case, at least according to what was written in the letter received, there would be no basis for it to seem like an official application and it should no longer have these problems (unless obviously Meta finds other excuses to bother it).

GitHub e F-Droid

Unfortunately the developer says he is very busy in this period but we hope he can find the time to handle this problem easily, i.e. by renaming the application, because It would be a real shame if Watomatic were to disappear from the various stores. Also because at this point it would still be dangerous to leave it on GitHub or F-Droid with this name because it may receive additional takedown notices.

Watomatic is a great alternative to get away from WhatsApp

As we explained at the beginning Watomatic it's a really good alternative to gradually move away from WhatsApp even though we recently republished our article on social media and more than one person told us they had problems with this app.

Others, however, use it daily without problems so we can only tell you that if we have intrigued you, you can try it yourself... before it is removed from the stores!

This news was also reported on our forum so if you want you can comment on it by clicking here.

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