For a while now, we have known that WhatsApp would eventually make video calls a thing thanks to the numerous reports from screenshots to embedded code within the apps. We started seeing screenshots last year from a test on the iOS app and recently on the Android app.
Well, now Whatsapp has sort of activated the feature on the beta Android app and I’ve been able to access it.
There are two ways of doing this: You can go to your contacts, select the contact you would want to start a video chat with and click on the “call” button. This will give you two options (voice and video) where now you choose the latter. The second method is by going to your “calls” tab, clicking on the “select contact” button and the contacts will load with the video button being displayed next to the voice call button.
This is actually a big move for WhatsApp. It is one of the “big” chatting platforms that is yet to fully roll out a video chatting platform for its users but it is commendable that they think it is almost ready for roll-out. They also rolled out voice calls much later than its sibling Facebook Messenger and from the latest statistics the company released a while ago, over 100 million people used it monthly which is awesome.
The new video calling functionality is available on version 2.16.318 beta and if you are not part of the WhatsApp beta program, you can download it on APK Mirror.
[…] rumours of the feature started last year which later on became serious when we noticed that they had launched it late last month to beta Android users. At the time, it was quite hard to make a video call to someone on WhatsApp […]