The extremely popular messaging service WhatsApp — which now counts over a billion active users — is growing as an increasingly more complex and feature rich app.
After launching things such as end-to-end encryption, Google Drive support for backup and even a desktop client last week, it now seems like it is looking to enter the video-calling space…
After announcing late last month that video calls for its Hangouts service in Chrome no longer require a plugin, Google is today rolling out the change to Google Apps users as well.
The change means that users attempting to make a video call from Hangouts using their Google Apps account will no longer be prompted to install a browser plug-in for Chrome. Now, users will only have to grant permission to their computer’s mic and camera to initiate the call (as pictured above).
Following this update, when users try to start a video call for the first time, they’ll see a message underneath the address bar asking for permission to access their computer’s mic and camera. If they want to change their choice later, they can change it from the address bar in Chrome… We recommend users familiarize themselves with this change before seeing the prompt.
The change first launched in the Canary and Developer builds of Chrome and later to all users in the public, stable release of Chrome, but today arrives for Google Apps users.
