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There is still a month before the Digital Markets Act (DMA) deadline, and WhatsApp is getting ready to allow the integration of different chat networks into its app.
Dick Brouwer, an engineering director at WhatsApp, said in an interview with Wired that the firm is prepared to enable interoperability on the platform, which now has more than 2 billion users.
When it comes to maintaining WhatsApp’s privacy, security, and integrity bar while still providing a simple method to give this interoperability to third parties, there is a fundamental friction that has to be addressed. According to what he shared with the outlet, “I believe that we are pretty happy with where we’ve landed.”
In 2022, the European Union reached a consensus to include messaging interoperability into the DMA. In accordance with this law, gatekeepers such as WhatsApp and Messenger are required to make their services available to other chat applications.
Moreover, Meta is working on incorporating support for other chat applications into Messenger. In the beginning, these experiences will concentrate on one-on-one discussions, during which individuals will be able to communicate text, voice, video, photos, and files across different applications. Previously, WABetaInfo indicated that this experience would be located in a new sub-menu that will be located on top of the inbox and will be referred to as “Third-party chats.”
Wired was informed by Brouwer, who was involved in the implementation of end-to-end encryption for Messenger the previous year, that this would be an opt-in experience in order to prevent spam and frauds.
Being open to exchanging communications with third parties is something that I have the ability to select whether or not I wish to engage in. He said that this is significant since it has the potential to be a significant source of spam and frauds.
Companies that are interested in being compatible with Meta’s system will be required to sign an agreement, the specifics of which are not yet available to the general public. End-to-end encryption is going to be necessary for WhatsApp in order to ensure interoperability. However, the fact that Apple has only recently indicated that it will be making adjustments to the App Store may be a sign that the conditions are not as easy as they seem to be.
During a conference that took place not too long ago, the inventor of the open-source messaging protocol Matrix said that the company has collaborated with WhatsApp on a “experimental” basis in order to ensure that the protocol is able to function while maintaining end-to-end encryption.
The decision on whether or not other operators such as Telegram, Viber, and Google want to add interoperability compatibility with WhatsApp is not entirely known.
According to Brouwer, who spoke with Wired, it is possible that third-party conversations and WhatsApp native chats may not attain feature parity since interoperability may result in the emergence of new privacy and security concerns.
For the last several months, there has been a lot of attention focused on applications that combine a number of different messaging services into a single platform. Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, paid $50 million to acquire Texts.com in October of last year. Due to Beeper’s attempt to bring iMessage to Android phones, which Apple ultimately decided to discontinue, Eric Migicovsky, the creator of the Pebble wristwatch, has been the subject of discussion.
