With a month away from the Digital Markets Act (DMA) deadline, WhatsApp is making ready to permit different messaging networks in its app.
In an interview with Wired, Dick Brouwer, an engineering director at WhatsApp, mentioned that the corporate is able to provide interoperability on the platform with over 2 billion customers.
“There’s real tension between offering an easy way to offer this interoperability to third parties whilst at the same time preserving the WhatsApp privacy, security, and integrity bar. I think we’re pretty happy with where we’ve landed,” he advised the publication.
The EU agreed upon including messaging interoprability beneath DMA in 2022. This rule mandates gatekeepers like WhatsApp and Messenger to open up their providers to different chat apps.
Meta can also be working so as to add assist for different chat apps to Messenger. Initially, these experinces will give attention to one-on-one chats the place individuals can ship textual content, audio, video, photographs, and recordsdata throughout apps. As WABetaInfo reported earlier than, this expertise will stay in a brand new sub-menu on prime of the inbox referred to as “Third-party chats.”
Brouwer, who labored on rolling out end-to-end encryption for Messenger last year, advised Wired that this might be an opt-in experince to keep away from spam and scams.
“I can choose whether or not I want to participate in being open to exchanging messages with third parties. This is important, because it could be a big source of spam and scams,” he mentioned.
Corporations that wish to be be interoprable with Meta’s system must signal an settlement, particulars of which aren’t public but. WhatsApp would require end-to-end encryption to allow interoperability. Nonetheless, Apple’s lately introduced modifications to the App Retailer may function an indicator that the phrases may not be simple.
Lately, open-source messaging protocol Matrix’s founder Matthew Hodgson noted at a talk that it has labored with WhatsApp on an “experimental” foundation to make the protocol work with end-to-end encryption intact.
It’s not clear if different operators like Telegram, Viber, and Google are planning so as to add interoprability assist with WhatsApp.
Brouwer advised Wired that third-party chats and WhatsApp native chats may not attain characteristic parity as interoprability may open up new privateness and safety points.
Apps that usher in a number of messaging providers beneath one umbrella has been in highlight for the previous few months. Final October, WordPress.com proprietor Automattic bought Texts.com for $50 million. Pebble smartwatch founder Eric Migicovsky’s Beeper has been in conversation for its effort — which Apple shutdown — to bring iMessage to Android phones.
