Over the past year, Facebook-owned Whatsapp has steadily been adding new features to the messaging service, right from voice calling support to WhatsApp web, a new interface, and a backup to Google Drive, among others.
The feature didn’t appear to be active. However, users could see the option to place a video call; actually starting the call led to an error message. It appears the feature can be enabled or disabled on WhatsApp’s servers, so the company can trial it with groups of testers.
While WhatsApp users have been able to place audio calls for more than a year now, a video calling option would be an even bigger threat to services like Skype, FaceTime, Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger. After voice calling, video calling is indeed one of the most awaited features in WhatsApp. While the feature isn’t activated yet, it is only accessible on some devices running the beta app.
Video calls may be coming to Android and iOS soon, but it remains to be seen if it will be rolled out to everyone at once, or will be an invite-only system, just like WhatsApp did when it introduced the voice calling feature. Voicemail will also be an added feature, which will hopefully improve the voice calling in WhatsApp.
