Before the World Health Organization declares the COVID-19 as the global pandemic disease, many people were still continuing to work from their office. But no one expected that COVID-19 could be the unexpected disease which shook the worldwide economy. This has caused many people to work from home. Students were attending classes too by using video messaging apps such as Zoom.
During this pandemic, most of the people have started to use the video messaging apps to have their meetings. School students were excited because of the lockdown, but teenagers were sad because they can’t meet their friends. Youngsters were using WhatsApp to video call to meet their friends without leaving home.
This has caused the interest in video messaging client to increase up to five times than the usual usage. Research has been carried out by Picodi to find out which are the most used video messaging apps during the COVID-19 period. The research has been done by analysing the average numbers of online search queries of these video messaging clients. As we all know the most common video messaging apps are Line, Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp and the most recent ones, Zoom. The research team has even compared the result with other tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft. These data obtained through the Google Keyword Planner.
WhatsApp is the most used video messaging app
Based on their analysis, it is found that surprisingly, most of the Asia peoples tend to use WhatsApp more compared to Zoom, Line or WeChat. It was noticeable that Malaysia is one of the countries too which was using WhatsApp most of the time. We all already know that WhatsApp is the most popular messaging platform in the world. But what we didn’t expect was it is the most popular video messaging apps to in the Asia Pacific region.
Taking a look at the map below, it shows that 98% of the South-East Asia countries are using WhatsApp to video call their friends. Countries such as Indonesia, Singapore and even Papua New Guinea were using the WhatsApp video messaging app to communicate with their friends. But how about attending meetings or conference calls? It is for sure, you can’t attend meetings and conference calls using WhatsApp. That will be a total inappropriate. We are assuming, some companies could be using Skype for Business though to have their conference calls and meetings.
Apart from WhatsApp, there are a few countries which insisted on using Zoom app as the video messaging app. For example, countries such as Australia, Brunei and Japan are mostly using Zoom video messaging app to have their meetings. The reason could be, most probably those companies in these countries requires the employees to use video messaging app and the camera has to be turned on. Personally, I don’t like turning on my cameras during the conference calls.
Even though Zoom is not secure but still these countries insisted on using it
Did you know that recently security researchers found out that Zoom logins have been sold in the dark web? Yes, Zoom is not secure as it says it is. There are many complaints on the Zoom app. In countries such as Malaysia, there is even fake news saying that installing Zoom is allowing hackers to steal their money from their bank account. That doesn’t make sense at all. Maybe as the Zoom video messaging app is vulnerable your personal information can be collected but not your banking account guys. Beware of this type of fake news.
Well, it’s pretty obvious that countries such as Thailand and Taiwan are still using Line as their favourite video messaging apps recently during this COVID-19 global pandemic outbreak. On the other hand, both Bhutan and Myanmar prefers to use WeChat and Viber respectively. To be honest, it has been for years, we hear that people are still using Viber or WeChat. Maybe WeChat there are still groups of people likes to use it but not Viber. The reason people could be using Viber instead of WhatsApp is because of their network availability in a certain region of Myanmar.
In a nutshell, it is crystal clear that WhatsApp is the most used video messaging apps during this global pandemic COVID-19 period. Maybe if we continue the research up until today then probably, Zoom could be the most used video messaging apps out of these video messaging apps.
