With more and more people working from home due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, video conferencing tool Zoom Cloud Meetings topped download charts globally throughout February and March, according to data from app analytics platform App Annie. Zoom offers video and screen sharing for up to 100 people. With an increased demand for collaboration tools amid COVID-19 shutdowns, Google has opened up its premium paid features of Hangouts Meet for free, ZOOM is offering K-12 students free access and Microsoft is offering a free 6-month subscription to Microsoft Teams.
"As more employees work from home globally, we are seeing strong demand for tools that enable people to feel connected and foster collaboration. Given their free tiers, these apps could also be good tools for businesses that haven't ordinarily paid for these services," App Annie senior insights manager Lexi Sydow said in a blog post on Monday.
Fuelled by conferencing apps, business apps topped 62 million downloads across iOS and Google Play during the week of March 14-21, 2020 worldwide -- its biggest week ever. This was up 45 per cent from the week prior and up 90 per cent from the weekly average of business app downloads in 2019, according to the data.
As people face uncertain timelines for the length of social isolation, video conferencing apps have the potential to vastly influence our daily habits -- breaking down geological barriers and fostering the ability to work and socialise relatively seamlessly. Meanwhile, Zoom has updated its iOS app to remove the software development kit (SDK) that was providing users data to Facebook through the Login with a Facebook feature. A network traffic analysis carried out by Motherboard claimed last week that Zoom for iOS was sending data to Facebook without making any mention of the practice in its privacy policy.
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