Telegram has finally added that one feature that it was lacking, that is one-on-one video calling on both Android and iOS. The company announced this feature on its seventh anniversary on August 14.
The feature is currently in the alpha stages of development. The video calls are secured with end-to-end encryption. Users can check if emojis shown on the screen of the other person and their own screen match. Telegram also confirmed that the group video calling feature will be coming in a few months.
Telegram also said that the Video call would support picture-in-picture mode which means users can multitask while on call. Users can also switch the video call to a voice call if they want to.
The giant has also added a batch of animated versions of commonly used emojis and a larger version of this Emoji will appear when used in a chat.
Telegram was launched as a cloud-based secure Messaging platform in 2013 and it currently has over 400 million users. The App is currently in the list of one of the top 10 most downloaded apps on App Stores. The addition of video calling feature puts Telegram in WhatsApp’s, Viber’s territory.
The company also said that its app on both Android and iOS have reproducible builds and it uses the same open-source code that is published with each update.
Features like Group Extensions for Channels,in-app video editor,two-step verification, animated stickers, speaking GIFs, Profile videos, Group Stats, and file-sharing of up to 2GBetc. were also added previously. It will be interesting to see what other features get added to the app in future.