Last year in January, Facebook’s CEO Zuckerberg announced to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, but since then we had no hint of what’s going in the development side. A reverse engineer @Alex193a has discovered evidence of this in the latest version of Facebook Messenger. The list shows the mentions of “whats_app” references, which means Cross-Chat Support with WhatsApp is coming out soon.
At the moment, Instagram is working to recommend downloading Facebook Messenger, as noted by the talented independent developer @Alex193a:
This is not really an integration of the Facebook service into Instagram, but recently @Alex193a has warned about the integration of WhatsApp into Facebook Messenger, including several important tracks! In particular, we’re talking about the possibility to communicate with a user that uses a different Facebook app, in this case between two users having WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Cross-Chat Support with WhatsApp
This could be a precursor to the long process that it’ll be to integrate Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp users. the most difference between both messaging platforms is that WhatsApp stores chat information on-device additionally to end-to-end encryption (along with the ad-free experience). this is often why WhatsApp is merely allowed to be used on one device.
The references point to the creation of tables during a local database on Facebook messenger, which are needed to manage messages and services. There also are mentions of other elements that might allow Facebook Messenger to know which WhatsApp users are blocked, push notifications from WhatsApp, and therefore the details of a talk recipient.
The content of the message wouldn’t be shared with Facebook servers. Thus, the Messenger app would wish to include a replacement protocol to cross-chat between Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. It isn’t known if Facebook would upload this local database so as to sync it across devices – one characteristic of the Facebook messenger is that you simply can send and receive chats from multiple devices simultaneously.
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