WhatsApp Cloud + Python

Pete Fison
PythonIQ
Published in
9 min readMay 27, 2022

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For some time it’s been possible to automate WhatsApp to send from your phone using WhatsApp Web. But the approach has some fairly big limitations for serious users:

  • Your phone and linked PC both need to be powered on.
  • Your phone and linked PC need to be on the same network.
  • You can only send/receive using your (personal) number and to/from your own contacts.
  • It’s not intended as a business tool, nor is it an officially supported service and could change on a whim.
  • AFAIK it doesn’t support sending/receiving Geolocations, Contact Cards, or Interactive messages with quick reply buttons. Or not easily…

If you’re looking for a more serious/professional way to automate WhatsApp, it might be time to check out Meta’s WhatsApp Business Cloud API… and if you’re looking to automate it with Python, a great starting point is whatsappcloud:

python -m pip install whatsappcloud --upgrade

Even with the free trial version of WhatsApp Cloud you can send unlimited messages to five (verified) phone numbers completely free. This is terrific news for small teams and freelance developers who might be looking to explore what’s on offer or add slick WhatsApp notification to the back end of what they’re working on for up to 5 phone recipients. The…

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Pete Fison
PythonIQ

Experienced Python developer with a special interest in web scraping, data wrangling, ETL, NLP, and AI Prompt Engineering. Former IT Director & Video Producer.