Two Popular Social Media App; Instagram and WhatsApp will not be available by the same name on the Google Play Store. Facebook purchased WhatsApp a while ago and last year it also acquired Instagram. What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is saying about this move is that it wants to give its users a more unified app experience.
WhatsApp will soon become Instagram and WhatsApp by facebook will become Instagram by Facebook. This information arrived late on Friday. Post this change, both these apps will be available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store by the new name. This move is expected to clarify the Products and Services that are a Part of Facebook.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is on Facebook now to find out why the company acquired WhatsApp and Instagram in the first place. The FTC is suspecting that this move was made by Facebook to eliminate any potential competition before it even arises.
Cambridge Analytica scandal that took place recently violated the privacy of approximately 90 million users. Facebook paid $5 billion to the FTC after the former was found guilty. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has already indicated a merger of the 3 platforms. However, the convergence is easier said than done.
The convergence is expected to realize somewhere towards the end of 2020. A single chat platform will benefit Facebook not only from a commercial standpoint but also from a data encryption perspective. End-to-end encryption was first introduced in WhatsApp. Facebook is planning to implement the same to its other platforms as well.
Facebook is also considering a system where users will be able to send messages across different Facebook Products. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has asked Facebook to present a briefing about the changes that will take place in chat services. Facebook is under the strict surveillance of DPC as a merger of user data from different platforms is on the cards.
Recently, Facebook suffered an outage. The engineers were working to eliminate any future threat of cyber-attack during the outage. It will be interesting to see how the new user interface of the app looks like after the integration.
