Facebook’s annual developer conference – the F8 2019 – started amid exquisite expectancies around privateness. During his keynote at the McEnery Convention Centre in San Jose, California, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg aside from talking approximately how his organization would refocus its strength on privateness, also mentioned WhatsApp – a social messaging app that has been underneath hearth recently from the governmental organizations over its give up-to-quit encryption.

While speaking approximately several of Facebook’s different services, like Messenger, the Facebook leader executive mentioned the social media massive’s plans of introducing cease-to-cease encryption in the messaging app’s secret chats phase. But whilst it came to WhatsApp, which is already an exceptionally comfy messaging platform, he pointed out a feature that could assist customers in interacting with sellers and purchase items to be had in their catalog effectively.

At F8 2019, Facebook introduced Product Catalogue, which might permit WhatsApp users to see all the gadgets available for sale from an agency at the messaging app. To position it simply, if you are interacting — or buying objects from — with a commercial enterprise on WhatsApp, you would be able to see the corporation’s whole product lineup on WhatsApp. Consider it as a digital brochure, best that this brochure could be to be had on WhatsApp in place of an internet site.

Product Catalogue feature

“This is going to be in particular important for all the small corporations out there that do not have a web presence, and which are more and more using personal social platforms is their major way of interacting with their customers,” the Facebook leader executive Mark Zuckerberg said onstage the F8 2018. This function will now not best help WhatsApp customers using helping them find out objects presented with the aid of a commercial enterprise easily on WhatsApp. However, it might also help corporations, especially the small businesses that don’t have a website of their own, to exhibit the variety in their products.

Interestingly, the announcement comes nearly a month after WhatsApp released the WhatsApp Business app for iPhone users across the globe and greater than 12 months after WhatsApp first released its Business app for Android customers in select markets across the globe. Apart from the Product Catalogue function, Zuckerberg also introduced that WhatsApp would make bigger the provision of its Payments function to more countries in the coming yr. He said that almost 1 million people had already been using WhatsApp Payments in India, and the corporation could roll out this option to other countries later this yr “aggressively.”

It is well worth noting that WhatsApp was given much less display time on the keynote throughout the F8 2019 than its sister platforms, which incorporates Facebook’s predominant app, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. This may have dissatisfied a few WhatsApp customers anticipating some other principal bulletins – just like the Dark Mode –by using the corporation for the app. But the crucial aspect to observe here is that privacy seems to be the primary focal point region of Facebook at F8 2019. And for the reason that a robust encryption era already backs WhatsApp, there was not a lot that the organization should have progressed approximately the app in this regard for the time being.

As a long way as several other capabilities like — the in-app Browser, search photograph feature, and frequently forwarded messages – which are in works at WhatsApp are worried, there is no phrase on while those functions focused on limiting the unfold of fake news on the platform will be to be had in the company’s foremost app.