Meta gave more details on the interoperability put in place to allow communication between WhatsApp, Messenger, and other messaging applications.
Since this Thursday, the DMA has entered into force in Europe. This new regulation will notably allow iPhone owners to use third-party application stores on their phone, but also concerns the most popular instant messaging services, starting with those of the Meta group: WhatsApp and Messenger.
This week, the American group published a blog article to detail the operation planned to enable interoperability between its own messaging applications and those that would like to communicate with them. Indeed, the DMA must allow users of an application to send messages to a user of WhatsApp or Messenger, and vice versa.
End-to-end encrypted messaging apps
While one of WhatsApp’s engineering managers had already given some information last month, more details are now being communicated by WhatsApp. “In the first year, we will allow sharing of text messages between two users, with the sharing of images, voice messages, video and other attachments. In the future, we will need to extend these uses to group functions and calls“, says Meta.
The American firm nevertheless specifies that all applications will not be authorized to communicate with WhatsApp or Messenger users, but that their publishers will first have to sign an agreement with Meta. In particular, they will have to promise Meta that user data is secured with an end-to-end encryption protocol, preferably that of Signal, already used by Signal, WhatsApp, Skype or Google Messages:
To maximize user security, we would prefer that third-party applications use the Signal protocol. Since it needs to work for everyone, we will authorize third-party applications to use a compatible protocol if they can demonstrate that it offers the same guarantees as Signal.
A three-month deadline to implement interoperability
For the moment, Meta is content to provide third-party application publishers with the rules that must be implemented in order to enable operability with Messenger and WhatsApp. Once a publisher has expressed its desire to communicate with Meta’s applications, the American firm will have three months to open its application. Meta nevertheless specifies that the implementation may have a slight delay depending on the candidate applications.
As a reminder, the idea of DMA is to allow a WhatsApp user to send messages to a Signal, Telegram, iMessage or Google Messages user, and vice versa. From then on, users would no longer necessarily use the same messaging application as their loved ones, but could still communicate with them. We will still have to wait to find out which applications wish to benefit from this interoperability.