WhatsApp Brings Group Video and Voice Calling

As promised, WhatsApp is getting support for group video and voice calling. The company started rolling out support for group video and voice calling last night to all of its users.

The firm says more than 2 billion minutes are spent by its users on calls every day, which isn’t too much of a surprise considering the firm has 450 million daily active users. These new group video and voice calls allow for up to 4 members at a time and are end-to-end encrypted. WhatsApp says the system is designed to work across under all the different network conditions, and that’s going to be crucial for its users in countries like India where WhatsApp is immensely popular.

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Group video calling has slowly started becoming a new trend for social apps. Instagram, for example, recently added support for video calling and group video calling, with Apple bringing support for group video calling with 32 users for FaceTime with iOS 12.

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Conversation 5 comments

  • madthinus

    Premium Member
    31 July, 2018 - 8:57 am

    <p>When group calling was limited to Intel multicore CPU's in Skype. Those where the days…</p>

    • BeckoningEagle

      Premium Member
      31 July, 2018 - 2:05 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#297383">In reply to madthinus:</a></em></blockquote><p>WhatsApp = CuSeeMe 2018 ;-)</p><p><br></p>

  • michaelangelo

    31 July, 2018 - 9:24 am

    <p>Encryption for 4 person? And all the stuff on each other phones? I doubt it.</p><p>They have to send some of the traffic on their servers. Therefore it's not really end to end.</p>

    • BeckoningEagle

      Premium Member
      31 July, 2018 - 2:08 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#297402">In reply to michaelangelo:</a></em></blockquote><p>I don't know how it works, but it could use an on-the fly generated single session key encrypted with each users public key. After everybody has the session key then the call is established, making it end to end.</p>

  • evox81

    Premium Member
    31 July, 2018 - 9:31 am

    <p>I use WhatsApp for almost all of my text-based communication these days. But, even on 1-to-1 video calls, I've found its video calling functionality to be exceptionally poor in terms of video quality and reliability. I can only imagine how poor the experience will be with even more video streams. </p>

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