While nothing beats a face-to-face catchup with a friend, often the next-best-thing is a debrief over video call.
Especially when a loved one is far away, maintaining those long distance connections is easier than ever thanks to handy apps on our smartphones and now, it just got even better.
After the excitement around this month's iOS 18 announcement from Apple, WhatsApp their own news to drop, announcing a plan to roll out a free upgrade that will change the way we phone each other.
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Users all over the world will be able to enjoy new features this month that will enhance the experience of using video call.
The firm, which is owned by Facebook, will enable the upgrade in the next few weeks.
These new features include being able to add more people into a video chat as well as the ability to share your screen and audio with other users.
Soon, you’ll be able to add up to 32 people into one video call across all devices which WhatsApp says will make it “ideal for watching videos together”.
Rumors of a new upgrade have been circulating for weeks after WABetaInfo, a site which tracks additions to beta versions of WhatsApp, has reported that WhatsApp is testing new customization options for its chats.
More new additions will come with the new feature, including “Speaker spotlight” which will highlight who is talking on the call.
The speaker’s profile will be highlighted and will automatically appear first on the screen, which is handy, especially if there are 32 users on the line.
WhatsApp said: “Since we brought Calling to WhatsApp back in 2015, we’ve continued to improve it with the introduction of group calls, video calls, and multi-platform support.
Today we have several updates that will make calls across your devices even bigger and better, rolling out over the next few weeks.”
Call quality is also a top priority for the company as older devices or in areas with weak network signals have been updated.
Meta has introduced a new codec called MLow, which improves reliability and reduces background noise.
Confirming in a blog post, Meta said: “As more and more people have relied on our products to make calls over the years, we’ve been working on new ways to ensure all calls have a solid audio quality.”
Earlier this year, WhatsApp made some tweaks to the way the app is displayed, organizing chats into different categories.
The first filter option being 'All', the second 'Unread', and the third filter is 'Groups'.
This most recent update announcement on video calls seems to be popular with fans of the app which the company hopes will be a ‘blockbuster’ success.