Unipile first messaging client ready for DMA

The European DMA (Digital Markets Act) led by Thierry Breton will soon shake up the instant messaging ecosystem. It will force services with more than 45 million monthly active users to make their services interoperable by 2024 for the most basic functionalities to 2026 for all functionalities.

Interoperability is the ability for users of different messaging services to communicate with each other without restriction. This allows users to have a single client to manage all their conversations, regardless of the messaging service used by their contacts such as WhatsApp or Telegram, without the need to use these platforms.

The problem of this directive is the management of the security of these interconnections. Today, all these services guarantee the confidentiality of exchanges by an end-to-end encryption system. End-to-end encryption is a security mechanism that protects users’ communications. Technically, no third party can read your messages because only your devices hold the decryption keys.

Making these services interoperable requires decrypting the messages before they transit or transmitting the decryption keys to the recipient service, but the whole point of this secure system is then lost.
The solution proposed by Unipile allows to respect this technical problem. Unipile is a messaging client that allows users to receive and decrypt information locally on their devices, and then send it back using the third-party service’s protocol, rather than doing these operations on third-party servers. This means that user data no longer travels unencrypted on servers, reducing the risk of conversation surveillance. Also, Unipile does not collect users’ data for advertising or marketing purposes, which respects the privacy and security standards of the European Union.