With the Digital Markets Act (DMA) deadline just a month away, WhatsApp is gearing up to incorporate other messaging services into its app. WhatsApp engineering director Dick Brouwer revealed in an interview with Wired that the company is prepared to offer interoperability on its platform, which boasts over two billion users.
The challenge lies in skilfully balancing interoperability for third-party players while maintaining WhatsApp’s stringent privacy, security, and integrity standards, which Brouwer believes they have achieved. The EU included interoperability of messaging services under the 2022 DMA, requiring large-scale gatekeepers like WhatsApp and Messenger to welcome other chat apps onto their platforms.
In a similar vein, Meta is also developing support for other chat apps for Messenger, initially focusing on one-on-one chats where users can share text, audio, video, images, and files across different apps. This integration will be housed under a new “Third-party chats” sub-menu above the inbox, as reported by WABetaInfo.
To ensure protection from spam and scams, users will have the option to opt into the experience, according to Brouwer who led the introduction of end-to-end encryption for Messenger in the previous year. Companies hoping to be interoperable with Meta’s system will need to sign a yet-unpublicised agreement and adhere to an end-to-end encryption requirement.
Notably, Matrix’s founder Matthew Hodgson recently disclosed that the open-source messaging protocol has been on an experimental collaboration with WhatsApp to ensure the protocol’s compatibility with end-to-end encryption. However, the specifics of the agreement terms remain uncertain, especially in light of Apple’s recent changes to the App Store.
It remains uncertain whether other operators such as Telegram, Viber, and Google are considering adding interoperability support with WhatsApp.
In the Wired interview, Brouwer suggested that third-party chats and WhatsApp’s native chats may not offer exactly the same features, pointing to potential privacy and security concerns that might arise with interoperability.
The concept of incorporating various messaging services into a single app has drawn attention in recent months. In a notable example, Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, acquired Texts.com for $50 million in October. Additionally, Beeper, created by Pebble smartwatch founder Eric Migicovsky, garnered attention for its efforts to bring iMessage to Android phones, which was subsequently shut down by Apple.
