It’s not really surprising that all communication apps are now scrambling to introduce group video calling features as people are turning to it both for business and for personal uses. Facebook just announced its Messenger Rooms feature to rival that of Zoom (well, somewhat) and now popular messaging app Telegram is teasing users that they will be bringing “secure group video calls” to users sometime this year. However, as to when that will be wasn’t really mentioned and no other details were given.
This announcement was actually just a throwaway mention in Telegram’s latest blog post where they talked about reaching 400,000,000 monthly users which is up from the 300 million that they had a year ago. They also briefly discussed how this current “global lockdown” is making developers and people realize the need for a trusted video communication tool. They claimed that they want to fix the idea that something cannot be both secure and usable.
Telegram’s strength and marketing push have always been how their app uses end-to-end encryption and is pretty secure compared to their competitors. So it comes as no surprise that they are focusing on the word “secure” when teasing about the group video calls that they will be introducing in 2020. Now as to whether that is in the first half or later this year, they didn’t really say and there are no other details about it.
Elsewhere in the post, they mentioned the improvements they are bringing to the Quiz Mode which has become pretty popular, even for educators who are trying to teach kids something even if they’re at home. They’re even bringing a crowd-sourcing initiative where they are distributing 400,000 euros among creators of educational tests. But of course, there are also just fun, silly quizzes you can enjoy and create.
Telegram also now has a sticker directory where you can browse more than 20,000 free stickers from the last 5 years. The attachment menu on Android is now accessible as expandable layers. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about this group video call feature soon.
