New beta versions of WhatsApp’s Android app now include a major feature: Video calls.
It’s as easy as you might imagine: pull up a contact in the app, tap the call button and choose ‘Video call’. If the other person has a version of WhatsApp that supports the feature, it’ll launch a FaceTime-like call; if not, you’ll be notified that your contact needs to update their app.
The feature was first spotted by Android Police , which reported that video calling had become available on WhatsApp’s recent beta builds for some users. I tried installing version 2.16.318 (451462) on a couple of different Android phones and found it to work just fine.
Call quality was fine, but I noticed a bit of lag even on a 50Mbps Wi-Fi network. Of course, WhatsApp is likely to address that; it asked for quality feedback on video calls, so hopefully it’ll take that into account before making the feature available on stable builds.
With more than a billion users already on its network, WhatsApp could effectively ruin the game for Google’s single-purpose app Duo , which only does video calls at the moment.
For that matter, Facebook-owned WhatsApp has been steadily improving its product in the past few months, adding features like user tags in group chats , the ability to
draw and add stickers to images a la Snapchat and support for placing calls and composing messages with Siri on .iOS devices. It’s even testing a public chat feature that could become available in the near future.

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