Facebook has officially begun the work on the unification of its social network’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger to create a single unique communication platform.
In short, all three apps will continue to function as stand-alone applications, but their technological infrastructure will be integrated and unified.
Last year, Mark Zuckerberg himself, who announced that in the future, the three messaging apps would be able to communicate with each other.
In addition to being ambitious, the project is also very complicated, both from a technical and privacy point of view. So before seeing it officially put in place, you will have to wait a long time. Although, Facebook has not expressed itself formally about the project.
The news comes from an Italian developer, Alessandro Paluzzi, who analyzed the code of the beta versions of the three apps and found several clues about the new project. Paluzzi published everything on his Twitter handle, @alex193a.
Details in Alessandro Paluzzi tweets show that from Instagram, you can send messages to users on Facebook Messenger and vice versa. And also, inside the Facebook app, he found references to WhatsApp, a signal that work is also being carried out on unification between Messenger and WhatsApp.
For the moment, the material discovered by Alessandro Paluzzi refers only to the construction of a local database that allows the Facebook app to know if a contact on WhatsApp is blocked, the sound of notifications and other chat details such as the phone number and if a chat is archived or not.
The integration does not currently involve the construction of a database for messages, chat history, profile photos, and members who are part of a group. In fact, Facebook is collecting WhatsApp messages from users who remain on the WhatsApp servers and are protected by end-to-end encryption, which makes it impossible for the company itself to read.
The project set up by Facebook is quite ambitious; we will see if it will be able to complete it or if it will be shelved.