WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging services out there for mobile devices, and one of its most oft-requested features has finally been made available.

Announced by WhatsApp on Wednesday, January 21, the messaging app has finally made the jump to a web client, but there’s a catch. As revealed by WhatsApp, the new web client is only available within Google Chrome at this point. Moreover, actually using the web client takes a bit of work, a QR code, and always having a network connection established on your mobile phone.

To get it all set up, you’ll need to open the WhatsApp web client through a specific link. Once the client has been opened, you’ll need to open WhatsApp on your mobile phone, snap a picture of a QR code presented in the web client, and then that will link your web client WhatsApp service to your mobile app. Once that’s done, you’ll need to make sure that your smartphone stays connected to the internet to make sure that the web client keeps working:

“To connect your web browser to your WhatsApp client, simply open https://web.whatsapp.com in your Google Chrome browser. You will see a QR code — scan the code inside of WhatsApp, and you’re ready to go. You have now paired WhatsApp on your phone with the WhatsApp web client. Your phone needs to stay connected to the internet for our web client to work, and please make sure to install the latest version of WhatsApp on your phone. Unfortunately for now, we will not be able to provide web client to our iOS users due to Apple platform limitations.“

It’s an interesting way to make a web client available, and perhaps not the easiest, but considering a web client has been requested for quite some time, one would imagine it’s better than nothing. Earlier, it was reported that WhatsApp was temporarily banning some users for using third-party clients, so perhaps this new announcement will be good news.