Back at Facebook’s F8 developer conference in May, WhatsApp announced that it would be bringing group calling with both voice and video support later on this year. Now, WhatsApp says the feature is live for users around the globe on iOS and Android starting today. The group calling feature supports up to four people simultaneously, regardless of where those people are.
The company says it engineered the feature to work under less-than-stellar network conditions, so you can video chat a friend or family member from a far-flung locale so long as you can get yourself online. Calls are also end-to-end encrypted, like all chats on the platform.
Earlier this year, WhatsApp announced that it has 1.5 billion monthly active users, so there’s probably quite a few people who are itching to try the new group calling feature out. WhatsApp first launched video chatting in 2016 and voice calling way back in 2014, and now its users spend a total of 2 billion minutes per day talking on the phone.
Over the last couple of years, people have enjoyed making voice and video calls on WhatsApp. In fact, our users spend over 2 billion minutes on calls per day. We’re excited to announce that group calls for voice and video are coming to WhatsApp starting today.
You can make a group call with up to four people total – anytime and anywhere. Just start a one-on-one voice or video call and tap the new “add participant” button in the top right corner to add more contacts to the call.
Group calls are always end-to-end encrypted, and we’ve designed calling to work reliably around the world in different network conditions. The feature is currently rolling out on the iPhone and Android versions of our app.
