Facebook-owned WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging platforms is rolling out support for voice and video calling on its desktop client – WhatsApp Desktop. This is an effort to relief countless people who use WhatsApp Desktop every day, who’ve had to reach for their phone whenever they received a call on WhatsApp.
The feature on the desktop client will, for now, only supports one-to-one calls, but will over time be expanding to include group voice and video calls. This feature, however, is not being extended to the chat service’s web client – WhatsApp Web at the moment.
Calls on WhatsApp Desktop should come in handy to the millions of users who use WhatsApp’s desktop client every day and have to use Zoom or Google Meet for one-to-one video calls out of convenience.
Like the 100 billion messages that WhatsApp processes on its platform each day, voice and video calls are also end-to-end encrypted, said the messaging service.
Read also: WhatsApp now lets you send texts WITHOUT TYPING – Here’s how
Over the last year, the Facebook-owned app has been very aggressive with adding new features. In late January, Facebook added opt-in biometric authentication for WhatsApp on desktop and the web, which serves as an additional protection layer. It also rolled out ephemeral messages, photos and videos that disappear after seven days and also rolled out payment services in India as well.
On the other hand, WhatsApp has had some heat earlier this year where WhatsApp attempted to convince users to agree to its planned changes to their privacy policy. This raised a lot of concerns among users about the privacy of their information, which in the update to the company’s Privacy Policy, stated that they’ll be sharing some information with Facebook and some of its partners. This move by WhatsApp saw lots of its users troop to rival apps like Signal and Telegram.
The new feature additions come as WhatsApp makes an attempt to convince users to agree to its new privacy policy and terms of use.
