It’s official! Telegram has brought Video calling feature. You can test it right now by grabbing a beta version of Telegram. It’s currently only available for iOS but I hope it will be rolled out for other OS soon.
It’s been a long time, many of the existing rivals had Video Calling features for a long time. Even the worst ones. But this time, Telegram did it. And there are some good reasons which I will discuss in this article and why the heck you should even care about.
Telegram is a wonderful app that enables you to communicate with your friends and family with lots of features like group chats, file sharing, and lots more. It’s basically an IM application that is cloud-based. So you never lose any chat history, files, or photos and you can have all of those from any device.
In a previous article, I have compared Telegram with its 2 closest competitors. And in that article, I have listed the best features of Telegram. And the list was big. That’s because it is actually the nicest working IM Service out there that is also not privacy-invasive and is truly secure. This free IM Service makes life better with small but very useful features.
The text formatting, bots, bigger file-sharing capabilities, supergroups, chat folders, and vast amounts of these little features which I miss on most IMs. These things made me use Telegram as my primary IM.
Privacy – Telegram does it better
We live in a time where Facebook owns WhatsApp and claims it to be the most secure messaging service. Even after the whole drama over the Jeff Bezos issue. It’s clearly not. This also applies to many if not most of the IM that exists. They are free, but they want your information so they can sell it to advertisers and help make them big bucks.
Telegram took a different approach, Telegram was founded by a guy named Pavel Durov, who founded VK and who showed the middle finger to the Russian government when asked to help stop the critics. Later Russian investors bought VK and forced Pavel to leave it. Pavel then founded Telegram after he received $300 million from his investments.
Pavel Durov recently started working on TON which raised billions of dollars, but the federal court halted it. As a person, Pavel Durov proves himself a hard wall against corporate corruption and exploiting users. He started Telegram just to do that.
Telegram not only provides many privacy features to the clients and servers, but it’s built into the company policy and philosophy as well. Unlike WhatsApp who claims good but does the opposite, Telegram is born to protect users from stupid nonsenses like snooping and spying by the government or any party.
WhatsApp / Facebook is lying
Facebook failed too much. Most of the claims they make are false, their products are trashy, they bought Instagram because they feared it may end their business. And they will continue doing this, as they are doing businesses and gaining much more than what they are losing. They do not fear you, me, or the federal. All the grilling drama year after year resulted in nothing. These companies will try to monopolize the whole industry.
WhatsApp not only violates users’ privacy and is a puppet of its parent company, after all, at least we can expect a good user experience right? Nope, they are as trashy as it gets. From head to toe. Between the year I first signed up for WhatsApp and the time I recently tested this, it hasn’t changed a bit. Its stupid, not cloud-based, the backups are not encrypted, the user experience is bad and the encryption is fake.
Telegram perfects the user experience
Telegram not only is feature-rich but easy to use. Everything stored in Cloud, that means you can access it from anywhere on any device. From small to big, most if not every feature of Telegram is built perfectly. The audio calling in Telegram is far better than what WhatsApp provides. It uses AI to connect to closest calling servers automatically and learns your calling pattern and network stability. They started late but did it better. Even the Animated sticker has something to be amazed at. They did it way better than any app in existence. They did it perfectly.
I had a question about why Telegram isn’t adding a Video calling feature. But I hope that whenever they bring, it will be amazing. And they did the exact thing. From the preview and beta test, I can say it’s good. A small preview I have seen and there was already something that caught my attention. The video calling seems crystal clear and with simple UI. While the UI may change with the update but I hope it stays clean. And the moment you swipe to home, both caller preview keeps floating compared to a single preview on most IMs.
Not just Video Calling
Pavel Durov in his Telegram Channel described why current solutions like Zoom just don’t work. They are not only vulnerable but a nonideal solution. Here what he said :
“The current global lockdown highlighted the need for a trusted video communication tool. Video calls in 2020 are much like messaging in 2013. There are apps that are either secure or usable, but not both. We’d like to fix that, and we will focus on bringing you secure group video calls in 2020,”
So clearly Pavel does not like the way everyone provides video calling. He wants Telegram to be better. Not only he wants to add video calling, but he also wants to add person to person or group video call which is secure and reliable and importantly, usable. I do want to know if they will add a group audio call or screen sharing soon. I highly hope they do because it will a 100 out of 100 addition. With screen sharing and group calls, Telegram may even compete Zoom.
Conclusion: Telegram added video calling, it’s in beta, yes its been a long time. But, you know what happens when random companies start rushing to catch users from here and thereby providing a somewhat working but stupid solutions. This is what happened throughout this pandemic. Companies started to popup with various apps and services. Even Jio, an Indian telecommunication operator made a Zoom knockoff. But we Telegram did not do this. They didn’t rush and said, “Hey, heard you need some video calling or stuff, so take this piece of garbage and shove it up”. They developed, tested, and released as they promised. And I really hope it will be a successful hit. Soon, you can delete WhatsApp and Facebook messenger for video calling forever, without regret.
