WhatsApp opens up video calling to everyone
Reach out and touch someone
WhatsApp is rolling out video calling today to its billion-plus monthly users.
That’s basically the entire story — if you’d like to use it, update the
app, open a chat, and tap the familiar video camera icon in the
top-right corner. The video chat results look like the video chatting
you’ve done before on FaceTime, Skype, Facebook Messenger, or Google
Duo: two faces, one in a smaller window, with a handful of small
features for changing the position of the chat windows or turning the
camera around.
That video calls took until November 2016 to arrive on
WhatsApp reflects the app’s cautious — some might say glacial — approach
to product development. WhatsApp launched in 2009, but group chats
didn’t come until two years later, and voice calls didn’t come until
four years after that.
But 2016 has been unusually productive for WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $22 billion. This year the company introduced a desktop client, end-to-end encryption, and features for writing and drawing on top of photos. The company also wants to mingle its data with Facebook’s, so as to eventually make money from businesses chatting with you on WhatsApp, but Europe is having none of it.
That
it took seven years for WhatsApp to add video calling likely reflects
both the expense of doing so and the fact that many of its users around
the world don’t have access to the high-bandwidth connections or data
plans that would support it. And if version 1.0 looks basic, the company
says it will evolve. “We will try to be the best video calling platform
out there,” Manpreet Singh, WhatsApp’s lead mobile engineer, told me.
Last month at The Wall Street Journal’s
tech conference I asked WhatsApp’s co-founders whether they felt
pressure to make an app renowned for its simplicity more complex to
allow for the features that make competitors like Snapchat more
expressive. CEO Jan Koum told me he’s trying to strike a balance — but
that lately the balance has tipped toward adding new avenues for
expression. If nothing else, the arrival of video calling shows that
those avenues are now under construction.
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