Over 60% of users have upgraded to Facebook's cross-platform messaging: Report

The company has reportedly recorded over 60 percent of its users who have updated their Instagram and Messenger accounts when prompted to try the new experience.

Instagram's cross platform messaging with Messenger was launched last year. (Facebook)

Two years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg surprised users when he announced that his company would allow users across its three messaging platforms WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram to message each other. Now, the company has revealed that user response to its decision to merge messaging for Messenger and Instagram last year has been positive so far.

According to a report by CNBC, the company's head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky said in an interview that they were beating their own expectations of how quickly users would adopt the feature to merge messaging across both platforms. The company has reportedly recorded over 60 percent of its users who have updated their Instagram and Messenger accounts when prompted to try the new experience.

Pictured on the right is Facebook's onboarding screen explaining the changes that interoperable messaging will work across both platforms.  (Facebook)

Pictured on the right is Facebook's onboarding screen explaining the changes that interoperable messaging will work across both platforms.  (Facebook)

The company's research also showed that 70 percent of Americans were using three or more messaging services, according to the report, which adds that the company was building cross-app messaging support to help users keep track of where their conversations were across their apps. Chudnovsky also told CNBC that Apple's decision to lock down its default messaging app prevented the Messenger service from serving more users.

The company has already begun working on integrating chats between WhatsApp users and Facebook Messenger users, as we noticed in a recent leak showing chats from WhatsApp inside the Messenger app. However, one big challenge integrating these services together will be the fact that WhatsApp is encrypted end-to-end by default, while Facebook Messenger and Instagram messages are not.

While Zuckerberg had also promised that the company would ensure chats on all three apps would be protected by end to end encryption, the shift to a more private messaging service is proving to be more challenging than it thought as it works to keep its abuse prevention systems to protect against harassment and targeting of minors on the platform. We recently reported that Facebook recently announced that the rollout of end-to-end encryption would not arrive until early 2022.