It's official! Video calls can now be made by WhatsApp

[G.O.G]

  

The video calling feature in the WhatsApp app for iOS, Android and Windows was activated worldwide, but is not available for computers.

Users of the WhatsApp mobile app on iOS, Android and Windows will receive this feature officially from yesterday, November 14, which was available in beta for a few weeks.

Video calls will be encrypted from point to point, as are the messages in the app.

Since its arrival in 2009, WhatsApp has introduced features such as group messages (2011), voice calls (2015) and point-to-point encryption, the desktop version, and the ability to draw or add emojis to your Messages (all this in 2016).

Now come the long awaited video calls. As on other occasions, WhatsApp is behind the competition. Rivals like WeChat and Line already have the function, and Messenger - also Facebook - has since April 2015.

Manpreet Singh, the lead engineer in charge of developing the video call function, says they "are built on the same infrastructure as voice calls, but there was a lot of work to do to do it right," says Singh, who joined WhatsApp in 2013 To work on the voice call feature. Development work, he explains, began earlier this year, drawing on the growing quality of the handsets available on the market.

Something very important for people living in places with bad connection is that the service will detect the quality of the video to adjust the quality of the video without affecting the communication.

In an increasingly saturated and competitive messaging apps market, it was critical that WhatsApp, the leader in the segment, launch the video call feature. Now it's up to its 1,000 million users to say whether it's what they expected - or if it fell short.