WhatsApp has announced that it is rolling out support for voice and video calling to its desktop app. This was made official by the Facebook-owned messaging service on Thursday, providing relief to countless people who are forced to sit on their computers and cannot get to reach for their smartphones.

However, WhatsApp said its nearly five-year-old desktop app for Mac and Windows will only support one-to-one calls for now. The expansion of the feature to group calls will be happening “in the future”.

Like the existing video calling feature on Android and iOS, the new desktop calling promises the same end-to-end encryption. This means that WhatsApp and Facebook won’t be able to eavesdrop on your calls.

Start off your week with tech news recap and trending conversations in your inbox

Enter valid email-id

Subscribe

I prefer it on Telegram

Video call work flawlessly for both portrait and landscape formats. Additionally, the desktop client is “set to be always on top so you never lose your video chats in a browser tab or stack of open windows”.

Unfortunately, support for voice and video calls is not being extended to the browser version of the service, WhatsApp Web.

To set up the new video calling feature, you’ll have to set the WhatsApp desktop app on either Mac or PC. This also requires that you already be a WhatsApp user on mobile. Once it’s installed, you will then need to scan a QR code to log in to the desktop app and check whether the feature has rolled out on your version of the app.

The new feature additions comes a WhatsApp is still making efforts to convince users to agree to its planned changes to the privacy policy. Whether those concerns raised by a handful of people on Twitter extend to the general population remain to be seen.