WhatsApp remains a strong competitor amidst the sea of instant messaging apps on the market. Despite attaining a mind-boggling 1 billion active users earlier this year, the company has not stagnated on rolling out updates and improvements to the core service. Surging popularity from the likes of Telegram have pushed Whatsapp to focus on their strengths as a messaging platform and introduce features to solidify its dominant position in the market. Thanks to its simple, yet beautiful user interface which is easy enough even for the technologically challenged among us, the average user in many parts of the world swears by Whatsapp to the detriment of carriers pushing for SMS plans.
But Whatsapp has evolved past being a basic instant messaging app. At first, there was the introduction of Voice Calls over a data connection. And today, after weeks of availability in the Beta channel, Video Calling has been officially announced to now be available for all users.
The feature is rolling out to Whatsapp users on Android, iOS and even Windows Phone devices in the coming week. Of course, you and the recipient of the video call would need the latest version of Whatsapp with Video Calling support installed for the feature to work. In order to place a call, simply use the call option which would then prompt you to choose between a voice call or a video call.
WhatsApp’s enormous marketplace places it in a much better position to leverage video calls as a functionality to keep users hooked to the service. What Google hoped to accomplish with Duo is what WhatsApp will very likely succeed in accomplishing, at least in developing markets like India where the service can be found installed on nearly every smartphone in nearly every household.
What are your thoughts on the Video Calling feature? Let us know in the comments below!
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