messaging apps will soon work with the chat service

WhatsApp: Interoperability and the Problem of Sharing Private Messages With Other Apps (with an Appendix by E.J. Brouwer)

It isn’t a shift entirely of WhatsApp’s own making. European lawmakers designated Meta as agatekeeer in September last year and gave it six months to open its garden to other people. With just a few weeks to go before that time is up, WhatsApp is detailing how its interoperability with other apps may work.

However, it all depends on whether other companies get on board, as there are still concerns about how the Meta-owned app will keep messages safe and encrypted when it starts incorporating other services.

The inbox of users who opt-in will keep a separate section for messages from other apps. In the past, this inbox has been in the development versions of the app. “The early thinking here is to put a separate inbox given that these networks are very different,” Brouwer says. “We cannot offer the same level of privacy and security,” he says. He says that there is no plans to add a separate inbox for text messages.

Overall, the idea behind interoperability is simple. You shouldn’t need to know what messaging app your friends or family use to get in touch with them, and you should be able to communicate from one app to another without having to download both. In an ideal interoperable world, you could, for example, use Apple’s iMessage to chat with someone on Telegram. However, for apps with millions or billions of users, making this a reality isn’t straightforward—encrypted messaging apps use their own configurations, different protocols, and have different standards when it comes to privacy.