WhatsApp’s voice calling feature delayed till next year: CEO Jan Koum
Soon after its multi-billion dollar acquisition by Facebook, WhatsApp had announced it will be adding voice calling feature to its app sometime in the middle of 2014. Since then we have spotted several screenshots of this feature, but now the company has revealed that it won’t be until the first quarter of 2015 that we should expect to see this feature in the app.
At Code/Mobile conference, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said that the company has some technical difficulties to overcome before it could add the voice calling facility to the app. The technical issues that Koum noted includes the app’s access to several kinds of microphones – which makes it tougher to make proper noise cancellation, as well as challenges to get the feature working in an event of poor data coverage – which is really concerning since a vast majority of WhatsApp users come from emerging markets including India and Brazil where a vast majority of people are still on 2G and EDGE networks.
According to the recent numbers, WhatsApp has over 600 million users. Koum said that he wants the service to cross a billion monthly active users within the next several years. When asked how WhatsApp acquisition by social juggernaut Facebook has been panning out so far, Koum said that it has brought better financial support and infrastructure to the company.
When asked if the company has any plans to monetize the service, Koum said, “We don’t think advertising is the way to monetize a product like WhatsApp.” Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg too confirmed that they have no plans to monetize the app.
Facebook too recently added the voice calling capability to its Messenger app. When asked how WhatsApp’s take will be different from Messenger’s, Koum said that unlike Messenger where people call their Facebook friends, WhatsApp is purely mobile and uses contact numbers saved in their phone. When asked if the company has plans to get the service interact with other smart devices in home, Koum replied in negative. “I don’t think people are writing to us every day wanting to get messages from their refrigerator,” he said.
It will be interesting to see if this feature — whenever WhatsApp adds it to the app — will be permitted in India. Recently Skype announced that from November 10, its service will not be able to make calls to landlines and phones within the country. The shift was made to comply with Indian government regulations that don’t permit Internet-based calls originating and closing within the nation.
IMPORT:-BGR.in
