Third-party chat will soon be available on WhatsApp

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) deadline is in one month, and WhatsApp is getting ready to let other messaging services use its software.

WhatsApp’s engineering director, Dick Brouwer, stated in a Wired interview that the business is prepared to provide interoperability on its more than 2 billion users.

“There is a significant conflict between maintaining WhatsApp’s privacy, security, and integrity standards and providing a simple means of granting this interoperability to third parties. He told the outlet, “I think we’re pretty happy with where we’ve landed.”

In 2022, the EU decided to include messaging interoperability under DMA. This regulation requires gatekeepers, such as Messenger and WhatsApp, to allow other chat apps to use their services.

Additionally, Meta strives to make Messenger compatible with other chat programs. These experiences will first concentrate on one-on-one conversations in which users can transfer data, photos, music, video, and text between apps. This experience will be placed under a new sub-menu named “Third-party chats” on top of the inbox, as WABetaInfo previously reported.

In order to prevent spam and scams, Brouwer-who worked on Messenger’s end-to-end encryption rollout last year-told Wired that this will be an opt-in experience.

I have the freedom to decide whether or not to engage in message exchanges with outside parties. This is important since it may be a major hub for scams and spam, the speaker stated.

Businesses who want to be compatible with Meta’s system will need to sign a contract, the specifics of which are not yet available to the public. For WhatsApp to be interoperable, end-to-end encryption is necessary. But the recently announced App Store modifications from Apple may be a sign that the rules aren’t exactly clear-cut.

In a recent conference, the founder of the open-source messaging system Matrix, Matthew Hodgson, said that the company has been working “experimentally” with WhatsApp to ensure that end-to-end encryption remains intact in the protocol.

It’s unclear if other providers, such as Google, Viber, and Telegram, intend to enhance WhatsApp’s interoperability.

According to Brouwer, interoperability may introduce new privacy and security risks, meaning that native WhatsApp chats and third-party chats might not achieve feature parity. This was reported by Wired.

Over the past few months, apps that combine many messaging services under one roof have gained attention. Owner of WordPress.com Automattic purchased Texts.com for $50 million in October of last year. Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble smartwatches, has been in the news for his Beeper project, which attempted to bring iMessage to Android phones but was shut down by Apple.