“iOS 11 will finally give users the ability to hold FaceTime group calls with multiple friends, according to a new report,” Killian Bell reports for Cult of Mac. “Sources familiar with Apple’s plans claim the feature will support up to five participants, and that users will be able to initiate video calling from within iMessage group chats.”
“t should also be noted, however, that this rumor comes from Israeli site The Verifier, which has no track record when it comes to Apple rumors,” Bell reports. ‘It claims to have garnered this information from “several people familiar with iOS development.'”
“The report doesn’t tell us much else about the FaceTime upgrade, other than group calls will support up to five people,” Bell reports. “That will allow the display on your iPhone or iPad to be split up neatly into four windows so you can see each participant simultaneously.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll find out for sure in June at WWDC, but, since it sounds like a feature FaceTime should’ve had already, we’d rate the possibility of this feature debuting as very good.
Considering iChat did that many years ago, I don’t see why FaceTime wouldn’t be able to.
Guess the rising use of Skype and Hangouts is finally lighting a fire under Apple’s ass. Hate how they’re reactive and not leading on so many popular features now.
Skype is good but it does suffer from quality issues a lot. Even with simple audio, I experience a lot of problems in my company.
Apple’s mantra is that their products have to be reliable. This weekend someone was complaining about the low light capability of their iPhone. They said their old Samsung was better but then in the same sentence said it was a shame they were unreliable.
Apple didn’t invent smartphones – they just got smartphones right. Same for music players, tablets and computers. Apple’s products work very well and are well made. To achieve that they have to avoid adding in every possible new feature since it takes time to get it right.
Facetime has worked well for me, especially when calling my parents in the UK from the US. We used to use Skype but it worked only sometimes. Once I got them an iPad it has been much less troublesome and more reliable.
Windows owns it. Did u expect anything different?
Yeah, my kids use a 3rd party app for this – dopey.
Apple should have had this ready already. They actually do homework, etc. together…
Damn – does this mean that the MacOS will lag…this will only work on IOS same way Messages on the Mac has minimal functionality even though that is where I use Messages the MOST (can’t type worth a crap on phones). As Voice of Reason said above we had this functionality on the Mac way back in OSX – Tiger which they took away for no reason I am aware of when they hobbled iChat.
I’d like the ability to mark messages as unread in iOS 11.
Now we can finally peer-shame people who have Android.
Hey… let’s do a group FaceTime instead of Hangout… everyone got an i—? Oh. Sorry, Bobby.
Or… Hey! We have a FaceTime group call happening later today! Oh… you don’t? Ok. Well, we value your input.
HOWEVER… Could this be a sign of a FaceTime web app???
Group FaceTime calls were meant to be in iOS 8. No idea why it fell by the wayside like this.
Probably someone else’s patent & Apple refused to pay. I was shocked when iChat disappeared and FaceTime arrived without it. It’s not that they don’t have an engineering team to write the code, so it had to be either the phone company’s forced the drop, or patent issues.
Or Apple just decided to drop it. They certainly dropped a lot of features and capabilities in Mac apps for the sake of integrating with iCloud and iOS.