Third-party chats are coming to Messenger, which will soon enable you to conduct messaging conversations with users who send you messages from other apps not owned by Meta itself. Though the option may not be coming for everybody.

I’ll explain.

Over the past few months, Meta has been working on facilitating third-party messaging app connection into Messenger, providing new ways to use Messenger to connect with other people.

This is an introductory screen, spotted in the back-end code of the app by researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, and as you can see, the process will soon facilitate cross-app connection with non-Meta apps.

Which would be more interesting if it weren’t a requirement, with Meta essentially being forced to open up its platform to third party apps under the new EU Digital Markets Act (D.M.A.).

Under the D.M.A., all “gatekeeper” platforms, or those that “provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers in relation to core platform services,” need to facilitate connection with third-party services in order to provide more choice and control for users. Which, for Messenger, means that it has to facilitate third-party app connection, but that could also mean that this will only apply to EU users, and those outside of Europe will not get the same interoperability.

Though, theoretically, Meta’s set to link up all of its messaging apps at some stage as well, and given that WhatsApp is the most used messaging platform in the world, the majority of the interoperability enabled won’t see many drifting outside of Meta’s ecosystem either way.

But it will be a change, and it will be significant to some users, providing more ways to connect with others via messaging apps.

Meta’s yet to provide full details of the roll out and when it will happen. But soon, EU users at least will have more messaging options.

It’ll be interesting to see what impact that has, and how EU users utilize their new connection options.

And then, whether Meta facilitates similar connection in all regions.