Yesterday, one of our most active members reached out (thanks, TK!) to ask if we’d like to see Facetime on the web in action. Through a string of circumstances, he has an iPhone with the developer preview of iOS 15 and, by extension, he has the latest version of Facetime to go along with it. As you might remember, Facetime is in line to get an update to make it a lot more like the most popular video chatting apps such as Zoom and Google Meet in the fall, giving it web-based abilities that allow calls to happen in the browser along with URL-based chat invites.
Oddly enough, when Apple announced this rather-large update to the way that they are handling video chats moving forward, the specific line was “even your friends with Android and Windows devices can use your Facetime link to join the call.” While a truly web-based solution should theoretically work on all major browsers, I was concerned with this verbiage as it made me wonder if Facetime for the web would only work on browsers running on those two operating systems. Sure, Chrome for Android can technically run on a Chromebook, but what a shame it would be if that’s the only way this new, more-open version of Facetime worked.
