Third-party interoperability of chat services: how companies see it and how many users are willing to sign up for a chat app

For about the last two years, WhatsApp has been building a way for other messaging apps to plug themselves into its service and let people chat across apps—all without breaking the end-to-end encryption it uses to protect the privacy and security of people’s messages. The chat app has opened itself up in this way before, but it’s the first time it’s done it this way.

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.

A separate section at the top of the inbox for messages from other apps is available for users who opt-in. This “third-party chats” inbox has previously been spotted in 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 are no plans to add it, despite the fact that the messaging service would use a separate inbox.

Overall, the idea behind interoperability is simple. If you want to talk from one app to another without the need for a download, you shouldn’t need to know which messaging app your friends or family use. In an ideal world, you can use Apple’s message service to communicate with someone on Telegram. For apps with a lot of users, it can be difficult to make it happen, as they use different protocols, configurations and standards for privacy.