While the Instagram-Messenger merger seems to be going great for the firm, WhatsApp integration will be its trickiest and most controversial challenge. The Facebook exec said the north star for the company in terms of messaging is to let the person see your message quickly and respond to it, no matter what app they use. Messenger rolled out a security update for voice and video calls in August.

Currently, only WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption for all interactions on the app. Earlier this year, WhatsApp rolled out a controversial privacy policy update that paved the way for the Facebook family of apps to exchange certain data with it in the future.Ĭrisan emphasized that all these features will be wrapped in the security of end-to-end encryption. She added that WhatsApp users will have a choice of opting in to decide how they want to interact with social networks (Facebook and Instagram). We want to make messenger interoperable with WhatsApp, so that you could send messages back and forth again just like connecting email and different email accounts. While there’s no direct interaction between Messenger/Instagram DMs and WhatsApp, Crisan said Facebook wants to enable that in the future: That’s contrasting with WhatsApp, which requires a phone number to create an account and accesses your address book to fetch contacts. You might still use the latter to initiate some conversations or check your other inbox, but you don’t always need to use it for all interactions.Ĭrisan said that Messenger is the social app - powered by Instagram or Facebook account - that powers all feed and sharing interactions. The first step of this is to make Instagram DMs look and feel more like Messenger.

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