LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) –WhatsApp, owned by Meta, is reportedly in the process of developing a new feature to enable chat interoperability.
This feature aims to allow communication with users who do not use WhatsApp. The European Union recently passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will come into effect in the first quarter of 2024.
According to this new EU regulation, major platforms and services like WhatsApp, considered “gatekeepers,” must provide interoperability for chats with users on other services.
This discovery was made by WhatsApp feature tracker WABetaInfo in the latest beta version of the Android app.
The chat interoperability feature seems to be located in a new section called “Third-party chats” within the app, currently empty except for the title at the top, indicating that it is still in the early stages of development.
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Notably, this section for third-party chats is not visible to users, and WABetaInfo found it in the code for WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.19.8.
Due to a lack of additional information in the app’s code, it remains unclear how this feature will function once development is complete.
Questions include whether chats from third-party services will be integrated into the main chat list and whether notifications for third-party apps will appear alongside regular WhatsApp chats.
It’s important to highlight that Meta’s development of a section for third-party chats on WhatsApp coincides with the implementation of the EU’s DMA regulations on chat interoperability, set to begin in March 2024.
These regulations mandate that platforms with 45 million monthly users in EU countries or those with a market capitalization of at least EUR 75 billion (approximately Rs. 6,67,100 crore) or an annual turnover of at least EUR 7.5 billion (approximately Rs. 66,710 crore) in the EU must offer users the ability to chat with other messaging platforms and services.
However, this timeline appears to be quite tight, as the regulations also require end-to-end encryption for chats between services.
This introduces significant security challenges, and the implementation process may take a considerable amount of time.
Meta had announced in 2019 its plans to merge messaging experiences across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook to enable user contact across these platforms, but full encryption across its own platforms has yet to be fully realized more than three years later.
