Within the scope of the Digital Markets Law, which is required by the European Union for every technology company, WhatsApp started testing a new feature in the application. With this feature, WhatsApp will include all chat applications on the platform.
Third-party chat support is coming to WhatsApp
WhatsApp continues to increase its popularity, especially in Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa and South America. The platform has grown rapidly as it is also easy to get new users on the platform because it is tied to a phone number and find the rest of your contacts on the platform.
This accessibility has given WhatsApp unprecedented popularity. But it looks like the platform will also take steps to open itself up to other messaging services as part of its compliance with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act.
As spotted by WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is working on a new section that will host third-party chats within the app.
We do not have more information about this from within the application. But to guess what it is, it looks like the first step towards interoperability between messaging platforms.
The European Commission recently passed the Digital Markets Act, which forces big tech companies to open up their products and make it harder for them to raise capital as a monopoly.
The Commission also recently marked some companies and their products as “gatekeeper platforms”, giving them six months to comply with these regulations. Meta, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are included in this list.
This means the company must ensure interoperability across these messaging services and open them up to external companies as well.
Users on other messaging services will be able to send you messages via WhatsApp and thus communicate with you without having to install and register on WhatsApp.
In summary, if someone prefers a particular messaging app, thanks to interoperability, they will be able to use that app to communicate with users who prefer another app.
This will allow smaller companies to get rid of their disadvantages and gain a place in the market and even compete with large companies.
We’ll see how WhatsApp implements this feature while keeping its security and encryption promises and maintaining compatibility with features like Communities. It is not known at this stage whether this feature will spread to markets outside Europe.
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