Yeah, this is a tricky one. I was in the same situation. I set up an Android VM with just Whatsapp and had the bridge on Matrix. That allowed me to talk to my family. For a while... Then Meta banned my phone number.

That was actually a good thing since now the Whatsapp option was permanently off the table. We installed Element on their devices and now they use that to communicate with me. They still use Whatsapp to talk among themselves though. Can't really blame them for that since even government and most businesses use Whatsapp in the Netherlands.

By the way, regarding the iMessage bridge, can't you run macOS in a VM? The kholia repo makes it pretty easy to set up.

I bought a dutch sim card (no registration) and a used android phone thats not linked to me to activate it. Then I made an whatsapp account with that number and I am only accessing it via whatsapp web on my graphene OS phone on a special profile with no acceas to my contacts. That profile also uses a dutch mullvad vpn server thats always on.

I am not dutch and don't live in the Netherlands.

I got my family using Signal. Then I stopped responding to them anywhere else. If it's important they'll do it.

WhatsApp is and always will be annoying to use this way, and that's intentional. They don't want you using it this way.

Lastly you can use RCS (Google Messages) to chat with iMessage users, but here you're just trading Meta spying for Google spying.

I tried hosting the bridge and it was hard to set up and unreliable. Right now I have WhatsApp installed on Graphene OS in a work profile so it doesn't get access to all my contacts, only the ones I had to specifically add in this profile. In theory you can restrict it even more using labels but managing this was a pain in the ass.

WhatApp will still know who are you talking to and you still have to run their app somewhere so in my opinion setting up the bridge just so I don't have their app on my phone is simply not worth the hassle.

I run a few bridged, with Continuwuity.

First of all, great choice. It works perfectly and it's very light on resources. Totally different from Synapse, specially for few users (1 user in my case) instances.

The wa bridge works just fine, but I wouldn't rely on in for critical messages. Actually in two years I never lost a message, but .... Well ... My wife would NOT like that I lose even one message from her in real time.

Here my experience https://wiki.gardiol.org/5-matrix-hosting (personal wiki, no ads, no monetization)

I run continuwuity and the mautrix-whatsapp bridge. It's not 100% reliable, but close enough for me. Especially after I moved it from the NAS in my basement to a VPS in some datacenter. I occasionally had some issues with my ISP doing maintenance, a power outage at home... I let WhatsApp run on my kitchen tablet 24/7 so it keeps that 14 day timer running. To my knowledge that's unavoidable unless you switch WhatsApp Business or something.

And I like Continuwuity way better than Synapse and the ridiculous amount of resources it uses to forward text messages.

But yeah, silently dropping the connection isn't great at all. I think the only proper solution is to nag people into using a different messenger. Signal is relatively straightforward to use, made for average people and comes with the same functionality as WhatsApp.

I used beeper for that because it enables you to choose between hosting the bridge on their server, hosting the bridge on your computer but using their homeserver which makes things way easier or just using the on device bridge in their app with no server (except iMessage because apple immediately patched every attempt of theirs so now you need a Mac to bridge it)

The WhatsApp issue that you have to open the original app every few days is unavoidable sadly.

i have Whatsapp in a frozen shelter to starts it every two weeks.

recently i was thinking to have a second home server just for bridges, you should be able to use it federated. but didn't try it yet.

main point for me was the sheer amount of ghost users.

I'm running the WhatsApp bridge and it is very reliable for me, probably the most reliable of all the bridges I tried.