Last year, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company plans on merging the three Facebook-owned platforms, i.e., Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, such that they will provide cross-chat support.
Turns out, the social media giant has already started deploying codes that will allow the Facebook messenger to provide cross-chat support with WhatsApp. However, since both platforms are based on different concepts, integrating them is not as exactly simple.
For those who don’t know, WhatsApp stores chat information on-device in addition to end-to-end encryption. Hence, it can only be used on one device at a time. Facebook messenger, on the other hand, stores information in an online database and can send and receive chats from multiple devices simultaneously.
What looks like a precursor to integrating WhatsApp and Facebook messenger was initially reported by WABetaInfo reverse engineer @Alex193a, who discovered traces of relational tables with WhatsApp in the latest version of Facebook messenger.
According to the report, some of the references related to Facebook messenger-WhatsApp integration include new tables in the local database to manage messages and services with other WhatsApp users. These tables (visible in the image above) will allow Facebook to access the list of blocked WhatsApp users as well as details of chats, notification settings and members of a specific group.
Although the content of the message wouldn’t be shared with Facebook servers, the social media giant will have to upload this local database in order to sync it across devices.
Since the feature is still in its early stages of development, take this information with a grain of salt. Usually, decisions like this are subject to changes during the development process.
