WhatsApp Calling On iOS

WhatsApp’s new voice calling feature for iOS is decent quality and easy to use, but the experience doesn’t beat dedicated VoIP apps for clarity. At this point, at least.

That’s our early take on the free calls feature that the Facebook-owned service began introducing to its iOS app this week. Already live to all users on Android, free calls are slowly rolling out to Apple device owners — but TechCrunch managed to sneak in early and road-test the feature today.

WhatsApp’s new feature has the potential to cause serious headaches for operators in markets where the messaging app is popular, such India and chunks of the Middle East, Europe and Latin America. (The service may have 800 million monthly users, but that doesn’t mean global domination, as I explained earlier this week.) WhatsApp is one of a number of messaging apps to ravage telco’s SMS revenues after collecting hundreds of millions of downloads worldwide. Indeed, the number of messages sent on WhatsApp alone each day is 50 per higher than global SMS volumes.

Despite all that potential, we — and the people we spoke to — found the quality of calls to be fine, but not on the same level as dedicated calling apps like Viber. Personally I found it to load faster than Skype, which is a real bonus. However, the calls felt like free international phone calls, which is exactly what they were. That’s unlikely to bother most people though.

WhatsApp is slowly rolling the feature out — as it stress tests the additional load that its hundreds millions of users will add to its network — so call clarity and quality may yet improve over time.

The actual process of calling via WhatsApp is easy.

There’s a prominent icon at the top of your ongoing chats, while you can hunt that person down in your contact list, where you’ll find a call icon next to the chat button. As with other VoIP calling services, making a call takes over your phone screen with a ‘WhatsApp call’ label in the top left corner.

Receiving a call is just like a normal call too — it even uses your phone’s default ringtone.

Interestingly, calls from people who are not among your contacts show up as ‘unknown’ with no number displayed. That’s good from a privacy perspective for people making calls, but less than ideal for those who receive them.

Free calling and texts have become commoditized by the large number of chat apps that offer them, but WhatsApp is still lacking in one obvious area: user IDs.

Giving out your phone number is the only way to connect, and that is a risky business. In the event that the person becomes a nuisance, merely blocking them on WhatsApp doesn’t stop them from being able to reach you.

Dedicated IDs would give WhatsApp users more control over their privacy. Now that calls are coming to iOS, I’d expect to see this feature arrive soon. That would bring WhatsApp on par with other messaging apps that have long offered user IDs, such as Telegram, Line, Kik and Kakao Talk.

If you’re an avid WhatsApp user who is desperate to get this feature, you’ll need to find a person who already has calls enabled and get them to phone you. Once your call with them is finished, simply restart WhatsApp and — hey presto — you should now have the feature.

Thanks @abd_kh for hooking me up with calls!

WhatsApp for iOS receives voice calling update

One of the most widely used messaging apps, WhatsApp, is getting even better on iOS.

WhatsApp users on Android have enjoyed the ability to call their friends for a couple weeks now, and a new update will allow iOS users to join in on the fun. With feature parity, the Facebook-owned app is further making its claim as the only messaging service you need. The need for messaging and minutes from your wireless carrier is becoming even more moot.

If you and your group of friends use WhatsApp to communicate, the newest feature gives you yet another reason to stick with the service. The only downside (if you can call it that) is that WhatsApp Calling will roll out over the next several weeks, which means it won’t be immediately available to all of your friends; you can download the update right now, but the feature itself will take a little longer to be available.

In addition to calling, WhatsApp was also updated to include support for iOS 8 share extensions, a quick camera button in chats and the ability to edit your contacts right from the app. Head on over to the App Store now to get the latest update.

WhatsApp users on Android can now backup and restore with Google Drive

A WhatsApp update rolling out to users on Android adds the ability to backup to and restore from Google Drive. In addition to chat logs, the feature also saves received photos — but it doesn’t appear to backup videos just yet.

Google Drive integration was first spotted by WhatsApp translators — the team that helps translate the application into other languages — back in March. Now, less than a month later, it’s available inside the WhatsApp version 2.12.45 update for Android.

Once you have the latest version of the app, you’ll find a new Google Drive option inside the “Chat backup” section within WhatsApp’s settings menu. To active it, you’ll need to select your preferred backup frequency and log in with your Google account.

You can also specify whether you wish to backup over Wi-Fi only, or Wi-Fi and cellular data connection.

“You’ll then have to wait for 4:00 am when WhatsApp usually does its daily backup for the magic to happen,” explains Android Police, which first spotted the update. “If you’re impatient, you can initiate it by tapping the top Back up now option.”

If you do this, WhatsApp will first make a local backup, then upload it to Google Drive. Bear in mind, however, that the process could take a while if you have a lot of data inside WhatsApp, and there’s no way to pause it once it has started.

It’s unclear for now whether users will be able to access their WhatsApp data within Google Drive and see conversation logs and images, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the data is encrypted for security.

This WhatsApp update has already begun rolling out via Google Play, but it will take some time to reach all users. If you’d prefer not to wait, you can download the APK and install it manually via the APK Mirror link below.

This release comes just days after WhatsApp for Android was overhauled with new Material Design visuals.

WhatsApp Hits 800 Million Users — 1 Billion by Year-End?

WhatsApp now has 800 million monthly active users, after adding about 100 million since January.

 

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

WhatsApp now has 800 million monthly active users, continuing a pace of growth that may put the mobile messaging app on track to hit one billion users later this year.

Jan Koum, the CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp, revealed the numbers on his Facebook page late Friday. The app, which Facebook bought last year for $22 billion, has added 100 million active monthly users roughly every four months since August, when it had 600 million users. In January, WhatsApp announced that it reached 700 million.

WhatsApp has more users than any other similar app, including Facebook Messenger, and has become an alternative to text messaging for many people around the world. WhatsApp recently launched a feature allowing users to take calls through the app.

It took Facebook roughly eight years to reach the one-billion mark. Facebook now boasts about 1.4 billion monthly users, while its Messenger has about 600 million.

Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously said he expects WhatsApp to contribute to the company’s bottom line, but not until it reaches roughly a billion users. In January, he reiterated that he expects WhatsApp to be an important contributor to Facebook’s business.

“What I’d say around messaging is we’re pretty early in that cycle,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “We are about where Facebook was in around 2006 or 2007, where, at that point, Facebook is really just a consumer product. There were no businesses in the ecosystem.”