WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Meta, is getting ready to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires major tech platforms to offer interoperability with other services.
Details
According to WhatsApp engineering director Dick Brouwer, the company will announce its plans to support third-party messaging services in March 2024.
Why This Matters
The DMA, which went into effect last year, aims to create a fair and competitive digital market in the EU. It mandates that digital gatekeepers like Meta, Google, and Apple make it easy for users to transfer their personal data from one service to another, and allow other chat apps to communicate with their users. Meta has until March 2024 to implement these rules or face hefty fines.
Brouwer told Wired that WhatsApp will start with one-on-one chats where people can send text, audio, video, images and files across apps. He said that this will be an opt-in experience to avoid spam and scams, and that WhatsApp will require end-to-end encryption to enable interoperability.
He also said that there will be some differences between native WhatsApp chats and third-party chats, as interoperability could pose new privacy and security challenges.
Digging Deeper
It is not clear yet which other chat apps will be compatible with WhatsApp’s system. Brouwer said that companies that want to be interoperable with Meta’s system will have to sign an agreement, details of which are not public yet. Some possible candidates include Google Messages, iMessage, Signal, and Telegram, which are popular alternatives to WhatsApp. However, they may have different encryption methods or features that may not work well with WhatsApp.
Zooming Out
WhatsApp is not the only Meta app that will have to open up its service to other chat apps. Messenger, another messaging app owned by Meta, is also working to add support for other chat apps. This is part of Meta’s broader vision of creating a unified messaging platform across its apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
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