WhatsApp’s Desktop Adds Video and Voice Calling
Apple’s Face Time just might become obsolete.
WhatsApp Callng
If you use WhatsApp on your desktop or notebook computer, whether a PC or a Mac, we have some good news for you. Users will now be able to make both voice and video calls on the service on a regular computer. Until now WhatsApp Web only offered texting and the sharing of files through traditional computers.
Not everyone likes using their smart phones for texting and making phone calls. And most people do not have tablets. So this is a really big deal for most of the world and bad news for telephone companies. Since WhatsApp is free, and Wi-Fi services are spreading, people will in the near future no longer need to have cell phones.
Apple should also be concerned with this move. Its iOS has its own service called Face Time. But that app only works in iPhones and iPads. WhatsApp can be used on any operating system. So people who use Apple devices will be more likely now to use WhatsApp than Face Time. And this is also surely bad news for competitors like Skype. And who uses Skype anymore, anyway?
Unfortunately, the WhatsApp desktop App will only allow one on one calling for now. Users will still need to use a tablet or a device using Android or iOS systems to make multi-party calls.
WhatsApp also promises its users that its desktop app will offer the same end to end encryption as its mobile device app. This should help allay the privacy concerns that people have these days about using social media like Facebook. And Facebook owns WhatsApp which recently stirred controversy when it changed its user policy to allow the sharing of information with its parent company.
WhatsApp boasts that it processes 100 billion messages each and every day. Its service is used by over 2 billion people. The company said it processed over 1.4 billion calls on New Year’s Eve alone.
