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WhatsApp, Used By Over One Billion People, Gets Video Calling Feature (engadget.com)
After disrupting how people text in many regions of the world, and changing how people make voice calls, Facebook-owned instant app WhatsApp today announced it is bringing "fully encrypted" video calling feature. From a report on Engadget: Now, the Facebook-owned company is ready to unleash video calls on everybody and in the coming days will roll out the feature to iOS, Android and Windows devices. When the feature is activated, open a chat and select the phone icon. You'll then be given an option to place a voice or video call. When we tested the feature, we found that voice and video quality was excellent over strong WiFi, but your mileage may vary if you're connecting via a mobile or slower broadband connection. While Facebook Messenger users have enjoyed voice calls for over a year and a half, many popular messaging apps like still don't offer the feature. With over one billion users, WhatsApp's video calls can connect people all over the world, regardless of their choice of mobile operating system, allowing it stay ahead of apps like Google's Allo.Though video calling feature has existed on apps such as Skype for years, what gives WhatsApp an advantage is its sheer user base. In comparison to Skype, which has about 300 million active users, WhatsApp has over one billion.
I honestly dont know how people can trust that they are doing the right thing without knowing about the design....
They use a modified SIP communications for Audio is it the same for video ?
knowing the codec would be good ?
the problem is that is it point to point or simply proxied through their servers ?
anyone know ?
thanks
John Jones
This could hardly make it easier. Expect automatic tagging every time someone, friend or not, posts your picture
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The big deal, as the summary says, is that WhatsApp has vastly more users than any other comparable app. Over a billion people getting video calling in an app they already actively use could have an impact. Nowhere does the summary suggest that there were any technical breakthroughs involved.
And as for the value of these companies, that's over a billion users to track and monitor and sell their data; the value of that is well established. That's why Facebook bought WhatsApp. That's why Microsoft gave away Windows 10 with all the telemetry it contains. That's why Google gives away Android, GMail, Search etc. This surely can't be a mystery to you in this day and age.
As an Android user, I'll be interested to see if this is better than Skype for video calls. I have found Facetime to work way better than Skype over the same connections; Skype is sometimes so crappy that I'll borrow an iDevice instead.
Congratulations, you just invented Skype.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Huh? That's one of the only reasons that I have an iPhone. FaceTime! Otherwise, most other things - including Whatsapp - are there either on my Android or my Lumia phone
Actually, WhatsApp picked up since it is a platform independent messaging system that allows one to send not just text, but also photos and brief videos through its service. One can also make voice calls. Now, video calls are added. This third one is big, since up to now, one could only make video calls on FaceTime, Skype and Duo. Of these 3, FaceTime is iOS only, Duo is Android and iOS only and Skype too is limited. WhatsApp in the meantime is there on many more platforms.
What I hope is - WhatsApp makes this feature available on all its platforms, not just iOS (the way it enabled only the iOS version for GIF files).
Have you seen the latest Photo app in iOS 10.1? I was started to see it organize all the photos in my album under the people in my contacts - it knew which was who, and funnily enough, even put the pic of a goddess idol in the lineup
WhatsApp in the meantime is there on many more platforms.
Of which most are soon-to-be-deprecated (like S60, BlackBerry, etc. basically anything that isn't iOS nor Android)
Or are nothing more than a glorified remote viewer-over-html (for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux) and needs to be used together with the phone app.
So, all things said, WhatsApp only supports iOS and Android officially too, like everyone else.
And although they started as a variant of Jabber/XMPP, WhatsApp has been extremely active in trying to shut down and perma-ban any attempt at a 3rd party client.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Technically Skype was supposed to use RC4
(which is completely crappy so it doesn't work).
In practice, Skype specially since the Microsoft buyout isn't opposing 3rd party clients.
(e.g.: there's a 100% opensource Purple/Pidgin/Adium plugin that relies on the web.skype interface and works on Linux)
(And in practice Skype heading toward the direction of packaged webapps anyway. Just don't mind the current incompatibility between microsoft's ORTC and the rest of the universe' WebRTC)
Which means you could use an encryption layer such as OTR over it between any compatible client.
(Some of which are entirle opensource stacks : eg.: Pidgin + WebSkype plugin + OTR - thus verifiably encrypting and provably secure.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp is entirely closed source and puts as much efforts as possible to kick out and perma-ban any attempt at alternative client.
So yes, they have *announced* that they use Axolotl / Silent Circle-style encryption but you have to *trust* them. No way to control if encryption is properly used at all. Nor whether WhatsApp hasn't been forced by government to but a hidden backdoor)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Whatsapp makes no sense on US where SMS have been free for multiple years. That's not the case in most of the rest of the world.
The convenience of having all the account details hidden from the user by creating usernames from phone numbers made it gain traction over username oriented messengers.
At the time ios and blackberry alternatives are platform specific, it's not clear for most android users that their android device is linked to a google account, sometimes autocreated so google talk never worked even if it was preinstalled. Skype mobile was shit, MSN messenger was dead and Facebook requires to "friend" your contacts so was never a viable SMS replacement.
I too thought that whatsapp was a bad choice and tried to resist on google talk, that was jabber compatible. Then they fucked it up with hangouts so I gave up and accepted the defacto standard messaging platform.
I can tell you it is great. Here is my list of whys (I know some may be covered by other apps):
- I have several friends 2000 miles away. We have had a group chat open for almost 2 years now. We share pics, videos, and life updates. I am not on FB, and this is just more personal. We meet up once or twice a year, and it makes it easy to coordinate things
- my wife and I have a group chat with our daughter... no need to remember to send multiple messages
- WA can handle bigger photos / videos / documents. I once shared a 30MB pdf with a friend on it. My SMS app chokes out on anything over 3MB or so.
- You can leave voice messages, which is kind of fun
- It works! I don't know how many times I have missed texts, either incoming or outgoing. No idea if it is my phone, my carrier, being on wifi, planet alignment, or what. But WA is rock solid reliable
- nice and quick search feature from within a chat
- customized alerts per chat
- it does have a pretty cool set of emojis
It has had its share of bugs, and i don't know WHY it can't show in the icon that there are new messages, and it is owned by FB (which really bugs me), but overall I don't see anything that compares to it out there.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
- WhatsAppWeb - You can access your chats from your browser. Makes it so much easier for me to type things or share things that aren't on my phone.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The convenience of having all the account details hidden from the user by creating usernames from phone numbers made it gain traction over username oriented messengers.
What you call a convenience is whatsapp biggest flaw. Why rely on legacy phone numbers? They are not free, are location based, can change, you can have more than one, you can share one with many people. Of all the IDs they could have used they ended up choosing the worst. And because of that there will never be a whatsapp on PC* so it is doomed to fail.
*a glorified phone remote doesn't count.
While SMS has been free for years, it's not always that there was iMessages or Hangouts that people could use, and even if they did, there was the issue of non-portability: you don't have iMessages on Android (Apple is thinking of introducing it now, while not too many people download Google apps on their iPhone if they're already happy w/ the Apple equivalents.
That's the point. SMS is free, but to send things like pics or videos, you'd need MMS. WhatsApp bypasses that assuming that one only uses WiFi rather than cellular data.
...Facebook-owned instant app WhatsApp today announced...
An instant app, eh? So they love agile over at Facebook I take it.
How many people are actually there on WeChat? I don't think the question was simply that of what are the apps out there, but rather, what are the popular apps out there? WhatsApp was there in its own right at the top before Facebook acquired them. Not sure how many there are on WeChat
>"announced it is bringing "fully encrypted" video calling feature. "
Fully encrypted? So it is end-to-end/user-to-user without any server interception? With a closed-source app, how do we know it has no backdoors, no logging, no intentionally weakened keys, no overrides, no stored keys, etc? Just asking....