About a month after announcing voice calling for Android users, Facebook’s mobile messaging service WhatsApp is now rolling out support for voice calls via iPhones and iPads as well. Being introduced slowly over the next several weeks, WhatsApp Calling for iOS will let Apple device owners use their Internet connections instead of their phone plan minutes to call anywhere in the world for free.
WhatsApp Calling for Android devices was added in March following extensive beta testing. The latest update for iOS devices also adds several other new features to the messaging app, including a sharing extension for photos, links and videos, a quick camera button in chats and contact editing.
Last week, WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum, also announced that his company had reached the milestone of 800 million monthly active users. Founded in 2009, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook last year for $ 16 billion.
Growing, Affordable Appeal
With the addition of Internet-based voice calling, WhatsApp clearly aims to boost its appeal even more to cost-conscious smartphone users. It has already succeeded in rapidly building a large and global user base for its free mobile messaging services.
WhatsApp has gained traction in particular with the world’s growing population of smartphone owners in developing countries. The app enables users to send text, photo, video and audio messages to one another without having to use SMS, which often incurs a daily or per-message fee.
By contrast, WhatsApp’s messaging service is free for the first year and then costs 99 cents a year after that. That affordability has contributed to the rapid growth of the company, which last summer passed the 600 million monthly active user mark. (It reported more than 70 million users in India alone.) .
Post-Facebook Developments
Since the Facebook acquisition closed last fall, WhatsApp has unveiled a number of other updates to its service. In November, for example, the company partnered with Open Whisper Systems to begin phasing in end-to-end, default encryption for all text messages sent via Android devices.
In January, WhatsApp also extended its app from mobile devices to the desktop. The new Web client lets users of Google’s Chrome browser pair their phones with their laptops or PCs. The Web browser version, however, doesn’t support Apple devices and requires a user’s phone to stay connected to the Internet during use.
The app for Android has been installed more than one billion times, according to the WhatsApp Messenger page on the Google Play Store. The new calling feature on Android has earned mixed reviews so far, with a number of users reporting that calls are laggy or plagued by audio problems and hangups.
