WhatsApp has launched its much awaited Video Calls feature which will be available on all three major mobile platforms- Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The company will begin roll out of the feature later in the day today and it will be available to all of its 1 billion monthly active users across the world.The Video Calls feature is the second major feature that the company has announced in the year after it enabled 256-bit end-to-end encryption. This feature has been developed by the same team that developed the voice calling feature that was launched last year. In fact, WhatsApp had Manpreet Singh, its first engineer on the voice calls project in New Delhi for the launch of Video Calls in India.
WhatsApp has made a simple interface which easily allows users to toggle between video and voice calls. It also allows users the ability to multitask while on video calls so that they don't need to end a call if they have to do something else on their device. Video calls remains encrypted end-to-end and the app dynamically understands what kind of a connection is being used so that it can optimise for video quality and use minimal data.
As of now, Facebook owned app isn't revealing a recommended minimum hardware requirements for video calls as it is busy iterating and scaling up the capabilities of the feature. Therefore, it doesn't specify if video calls can be used on 2G networks or not.
Apart from announcing this, the company revealed for the first time that it had 160 million active users in India, which is the most for it globally for any country. It also revealed that on Diwali day alone 8 million messages were sent out using WhatsApp out of India which was also a record.
"Video calling is one of the most requested features from people in India. We're proud to have the opportunity to launch this feature in India, we we now have 160 million users, and we look forwa rd to seeing people use WhatsApp to talk to their friends and loved ones face-to-face," said Jan Koum, CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp.
Before this, the company also added the ability to share GIFs and doodle on pictures shared through the app.
Source: WhatsApp Video Calls coming today to Android, iOS and Windows Phone
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