Facebook announced group calling feature for Messenger app to make more interesting. This calling feature will be available to Android and iOS users in coming hours. Of course, this group calling feature is free.
Now, you can dial up to 50 friends concurrently over the Internet. Once your app supports this, you will see a phone icon in group chats. Tap on this icon for starting group calls and add people to this call. If you were invited to a group call but you missed, you can always join it just by tapping on same phone icon.
Facebook began offering VoIP back in 2013 and started audio call features in April 2014. So, people could make audio calls to friends via Messenger. Now, VoIP calls over messenger accounts for 10% of global VoIP calls. It shows that Messenger is also popular among users for audio calls. So, launching group audio call feature also makes sense.
Now after this group audio calling, people have started thinking about group video calling feature. Group video calling is another interesting thing people use.
Facebook wants to replace your phone number with Messenger. So, it wants people to use it as a primary way of communication on Phone. Although, it is forcing people to use Messenger by not allowing them to access messages on the Facebook app. It has more control over phone numbers as it lets you block people and filter messages.
With over 900 million active users, Messenger is one of the fastest growing apps. Soon, it will touch 1 billion active users mark. Facebook has already started making it a separate platform to help business and users both. Recently, it also added few games and AI-powered bots.
Messenger is now an interesting app and soon it will be a part of business as a customer support tool. Now, anyone can use Messenger without even having a Facebook account. With this new group calling feature, Messenger is now more powerful. but, it will have to bring more things to compete with Google Hangouts and Skype which are more popular for video calls.
Source: Facebook
