WhatsApp Opt-In Policy & Deterministic Fallback Policy Announcement

Facebook has made two changes that impact how Vonage customers can use the WhatsApp messaging service via our Messages API.

A simplified opt-in policy for business-initiated messages

Deprecation of the Fallback Locale

You can find more details on these changes below.

Simplified Opt-In Policy
Facebook has implemented a new Opt-In Policy, which allows businesses to collect opt-ins in a wider variety of ways - both on, and off, WhatsApp.

This means you no longer need to create a UI to obtain opt in from your customers. You can find more details in this knowledge base article.

In summary, Facebook require a business to:

Clearly state that a person is opting in to receive messages from the business over WhatsApp.

Clearly state the business’ name that a person is opting in to receive messages from.

Comply with applicable laws.

As long as the opt-in method meets the above requirements, Facebook will view it as policy compliant. For example, the policy allows for opt-in via website, interactive voice response (IVR), within a WhatsApp thread or with a click to WhatsApp ad.

Deprecation of the Fallback Locale

Facebook has now deprecated the fallback language policy, and the deterministic language policy is now the default policy. This means that a message template needs to define the language and locale that is to be used.

This has been in place since 8 April 2020, any messages since then bearing the “fallback” policy will have failed with a 1020 error in your message status webhook.

To ensure your Templated Messages are delivered your request must contain the “whatsapp” node which sets “policy” as “deterministic” and “locale” as the language you are sending the message in, which is defined in your WhatsApp Business Manager. If this is not provided in the API request it will fail immediately with a HTTP error 400 Bad Request.

This change will be deployed to our Messages API on the 2 September, 2020. This is a breaking change for current integrations that have not updated to the new deterministic policy or do not specify the whatsapp node in their request body.

You can find more details in our documentation about the deterministic policy.

Further Questions
If you are having problems with either of these changes please reach out to our support team at support@nexmo.com.