Signal now lets you add up to 40 participants to video calls

While Signal has gained immense popularity this year, the privacy-focused messenger still lags far behind its two main competitors — Telegram and WhatsApp. One of the main reasons behind this is that Signal doesn’t offer quite as many features as the other two. However, the developers behind the app have been hard at work adding new features over the last few months to attract even more users. The app recently received a new monetization feature to help users make monetary contributions to support and sustain the development. Now, it’s rolling out support for up to 40 person group video calls.

In a recent blog post (via Android Police), Signal explains that it originally used an open-source solution for end-to-end encrypted group video calls. However, since it couldn’t reliably scale the open-source solution to support more than eight participants, it developed its own open-source calling service that supports up to 40 participants. Signal has been using this new solution for video calls for the past nine months, and it’s now finally scaling the group video call limit to 40 participants.

Signal now supports 40 person group calls. Building large end-to-end encrypted group calls required some new engineering. Learn how we did it here: https://t.co/i27rRqkI4l

— Signal (@signalapp) December 15, 2021

In contrast, WhatsApp currently supports group video calls with up to eight participants and, up until last year, it only supported four participants. However, now that Signal has increased the limit to forty participants, we expect WhatsApp to follow suit. Telegram, on the other hand, allows up to 1000 participants to join the same group call, but only lets 30 participants broadcast their camera and screen to the rest of the participants.

If you’re interested in learning more about Signal’s new video calling solution, check out the original blog post by following the link above.

The post Signal now lets you add up to 40 participants to video calls appeared first on xda-developers.

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