WhatsApp May Soon Roll Out Third-Party Chat Support, Claims Report

WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging platform, seems to be in plans to introduce third-party messaging applications on the platform anytime soon in order to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

This comes after the engineering director at WhatsApp, told Wired that the company is ready to offer interoperability on the platform with over 2 billion users.

“There is a tremendous contradiction between providing an easy mechanism to give this interoperability to third parties and maintaining WhatsApp’s privacy, security, and integrity bar,” quoted the report.

It’s unclear if other providers, like as Telegram, want to enhance WhatsApp’s interoperability. Additionally, Meta is striving to make Messenger compatible with other chat programmes. The research states that text messaging, as well as the sending of photos, voice chats, videos, and files, will be the main areas of interoperability between WhatsApp and Messenger.

Group conversations and phone calls will follow later. “It is imperative that consumers opt-in to this, as it is one of the primary prerequisites. I have the freedom to decide whether or not to engage in message exchanges with outside parties. This is significant because spam and scams may come from it,” according to Brouwer.

If they choose to, WhatsApp users will see messages from other applications at the top of their inbox in a distinct section. “Despite WhatsApp working on its interoperability plan for more than a year, it will still take some time for third-party chats to hit people’s apps,” said the article.

Fines for noncompliance with EU DMA may reach 10% of the company’s yearly worldwide turnover, or 20% in the case of recurrent violations.