Taking another step towards unifying all the apps, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp – under one umbrella, Facebook is adding the ‘WhatsApp from Facebook’ for new users on the messaging platform in 2020.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his plans of integrating chat services – WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram – to let users message each other across platforms. Zuckerberg called the project ‘long-term’ and said that the cross-app functionality will start gradually happening in 2020.
The ‘WhatsApp from Facebook’ status was spotted by WABetaInfo on Thursday.
“WhatsApp from Facebook is added to the WhatsApp Status for newly registered users!’ posted the website. A follower replied: “This is a feature that they know how to implement faster!”
In September last year WhatsApp rolled out a feature for Android users that would let them share their status stories directly as Facebook stories and on other apps.
Like Instagram, WhatsApp’s status stories lets you post images, text and videos on your profile and these disappear after 24 hours.
Facebook’s video calling device Portal also works with just a WhatsApp account, allowing users to make video calls and access features like ‘Story Time’ even if they don’t have a Facebook account.
According to Zuckerberg, “more than the commercial benefits of the chat integration between the apps he was concerned about data encryption”.
“The first reason that I’m excited about this is moving more to end-to-end encryption by default in more of our products. People really like this in WhatsApp. I think it’s the direction that we should be going in with more things in the future,” Zuckerberg told analysts during a conference call.
“There are also a number of cases that we see where people tell us that they want to be able to message across the different services,” Zuckerberg noted.
This move could let Facebook “tout higher user engagement to advertisers, further ramping up its advertising division”.
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