Well, if meta is going to sign an agreement with the app, it's probably going to show which app a user is using, especially to avoid username/phone number collisions between platforms.
> I think it was only a change in the ToS that was reflecting what they had already been doing in practice for years, right? Most people I know did not really care, they just got exposed to alternatives (Signal, Telegram, Threema), and then realized that WhatsApp was just fine for them.
Nope, it was much bigger than that, it also heavily widened the scope of the data they stored without encryption.
> I am not sure it will, for the same reason almost everybody uses Google Chrome (not a Chromium variant) or Safari even when there is no lock-in: people just use what they are exposed to.
Chromium isn't relevant here, Email is. Even though Gmail and Outlook control like 90% of the market, it didn't stop competitors like Proton or Hey from existing, it allows others to innovate without hitting the same issue, lack of users on their platforms.
> An open API enables third-party apps, and that's cool. But forcing WhatsApp to support third-party protocols in their own app is just weird to me
I don't think they have to support anything, it's just an open API, the other app has to be compatible with WhatsApp to be able to send anything. Also, why not? They have the capability to do so.
I find matrix's article on this very useful https://matrix.org/blog/2022/02/03/digital-markets-act-and-i...