COVID-19: As coronavirus pandemic spreads, video calling apps surge in popularity

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread like wildfire. Many governments are taking precautions like India's 21-day lockdown to curb it. And due to this lockdown people are having to work from home and attend meetings via video chatting apps like Zoom Cloud Meetings, Skype and more. Apart from making official calls, these apps are also letting users stay connected to each other, even if they cannot meet as they are practising social distancing.

According to a report by VentureBeat, citing data from Apptopia, video-calling apps like Zoom Cloud Meetings, Houseparty and Marco Polo are being widely downloaded and used on both iOS and Android operating systems. This trend started back in February and has grown many-fold in March.

According to App Annie, Zoom Cloud Meetings was the top app downloaded in the first two weeks of March, which the major chunk of downloads coming from the US and UK.

According to Apptopia, worldwide downloads of Zoom Cloud Meetings grew from 1,71,574 back on February 15, to 24,10,171 on March 25.

Houseparty, which is another video calling app rose from 24,795 per day on February 15 to 6,51,694 on March 25.

Other video calling apps have also seen a major increase in the number of downloads and daily users. App Annie has stated that Snapchat has also increased its app engagement time between March 1 to March 14.

Marco Polo according to Apptopia, jumped from 12,674 daily downloads on February 15 to 73,395 daily downloads on March 25.

In related news, Microsoft has also announced that its Microsoft Teams chat and conferencing app between March 11 and March 18 gained over 12 million daily users, which according to the company was a 37.5 percent jump from its usual userbase.