How will it be Interoperability of WhatsApp with other applications messaging? As you knew, and if you don’t now, the new policy of the European Union forces the sector leader to “open up” to other offers, that is, to facilitate a certain type of compatibility with third-party alternatives, given its position. . on the market.

WhatsApp will comply with the European Union’s new digital markets law, which aims to “level the playing field for all digital companies, regardless of their size. […] end unfair practices against companies and consumers.” The bill also suggests that “interoperability between messaging platforms will improve. Users of small or large platforms will be able to exchange messages, send files or make video calls between these applications.

The law will specifically affect what the EU calls the “gatekeepers”, the tech giants that dominate most of the community’s home hardware and software market: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft and Samsung. This means that it’s not just WhatsApp, although it seems that the Facebook app – that is, Meta – will be one of the pioneers of this paradigm shift.

Characteristic, The law is expected to come into force in March this year and companies that don’t comply will be subject to sanctions and may even go out of business. In short, Meta has been working for some time to enable this interoperability and be careful, because it is not only WhatsApp: Facebook Messenger, another of the most popular applications in its category, will follow the same path.

The premise is simple. As simple as using an email service, based on a standard protocol that allows you to communicate with users of other services. And before you ask yourself, yes, the same could be done with messaging, but the giants of the industry preferred to compete with each other to attract the most users… Until the EU figured out a common sense.

In short, as explained in Wired, the interoperability of WhatsApp with other messaging applications will be done in a rather special way, since the conversations will not be integrated with the service’s conversations, but will be divided into a kind of section called “third-party chat”, a separate mailbox which for obvious reasons do not guarantee the same level of security as native messages.

This means that any messaging app that wants to be compatible with WhatsApp will have to jump through the Meta hoop, including signing the contract and its terms, as well as using the company’s servers. In addition, third-party apps will be able to accept the Signal encryption protocol (the one used by WhatsApp) before connecting to WhatsApp’s servers, something they will “appreciate” in Metal in addition to proxying their communications.

It also states that those apps that use a different encryption protocol must also comply with WhatsApp’s security standards. Is this perhaps a reference to Telegram, which uses its own non-standard encryption protocol? We’ll have to see. How it all fits together in the end remains to be seen, because as presented, it doesn’t look very good, although in the end the effect is desired.

What other apps will have to comply with the Digital Markets Act? If it mattered to Google, iMessage would be next. However, its implementation in the EU is not as massive as that of WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, and it is not helped by Apple’s predisposition, because there is none.