Zoom Video Conferencing App Downloads Dethrone Whatsapp And TikTok In India

The Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 virus was classified as a pandemic and has spread all over the world.  Governments across the world are currently focussing their efforts and resources towards stopping the spread of the virus and to find a vaccine.  The virus has affected the economies all over the world and forced many businesses and organisations to lay off their employees. This impact on the world economies,  by the virus, can only be gauged after we survive this ordeal. However, amid all this economic wreckage, there is an unlikely star who is thriving in the present economic conditions.

Zoom, a remote video conferencing service based out of the Silicon Valley in America.  As many countries across the globe are imposing lockdowns and shutting down schools and colleges, business and schools have quickly adapted and shifted to the remote conferencing app, Zoom.  More and more users are thronging to the app store to install Zoom because it is the only app currently available which is able to have more than 10 users on a single call. Zoom is currently ranked number 1 on the Google Play Store in India, dethroning popular applications like WhatsApp, TikTok and Instagram. Even though Whatsapp has 400 million monthly active users and TikTok has 119 million active users in India, Zoom managed to beat both these apps in terms of popularity.   Zoom currently has more than a billion downloads on the Google Play Store and 50 million downloads in India alone were done just this month. The global daily active users on the Zoom App rose upto 67% since January 1st, 2020. Microsoft Teams App has over 10 million downloads. Google’s Hangouts advanced features were made free till the month of July which usually cost 25$ per user while Zooms pricier offering sits at 19$ per user per month. Google Hangouts offers upto 250 users per single meeting while Zoom can host up to 500 users in a single meeting without experiencing latency issues.

When the users quickly started increasing, Zoom stepped up to the challenge effortlessly taking on all the bandwidth and usage it is currently experiencing.  Zoom has also removed time limits for the conference calls and made the entire suite free of cost for schools and businesses in the affected regions across the globe, thereby further increasing its popularity.  Students or teachers who fill out an online form using their school email addresses and are then verified by Zoom will have any accounts associated with that school’s domain also gain unlimited temporary meeting minutes. The free Basic accounts are also available by request in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland, Poland, Romania and South Korea.  When Zoom made its debut on the stock market in April 2019, it was valued at 15 billion dollars, but it is currently valued at 38.5 billion dollars due to the rise in its demand. Zoom founder and Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan said, “I told the team that with any crisis like this, let’s not leverage the opportunity for marketing or sales.  Let’s focus on our customers,” and “If you leverage this opportunity for money, I think that’s a horrible culture.”

The rise in popularity of zoom, which is a cloud enterprise, gives an insight into the future of cloud computing.  More companies and organisations will now look to make the shift towards cloud based models and integrate them into work flows.