Apple could end this right now an assume the mantle of king of quarantine videoconferencing.
FaceTime has already become a proprietary eponym in the way that you make a xerox of a document or ask for a Kleenex after you sneeze. FaceTime has become even more popular during this time but people have to seek out alternatives when just one member of the call you want to place is an Android user.
1. Offer an Android FaceTime client without all the bells and whistles. Allow Android users to join in on a call. Limit it to just cameras. No Animoji or any of the fun stuff. It’ll make Android users want to get an iPhone.
2. Allow FaceTime to broadcast online with a link that anybody with the link can join. Allow the leader to control who, if anybody, can speak.
3. Optionally, Apple can also go after the work from home, corporate market by adding desktop sharing and whiteboard features.
Apple is missing a huge opportunity to make FaceTime mainstream.
I'd love to see cross-platform FaceTime, but there are a couple of barriers to what you suggest.
One, what you're describing is not a weeks project, it's at best a many months project, or a year project (to get it to a level of polish where Apple is willing to release it). So, getting "the mantle of king of
quarantine videoconferencing" seems like a fairly unrealistic goal. The existing players in the cross-platform conferencing marketplace aren't going to be standing still for those months-or-year.
Two, if I understand correctly, Apple was originally intending to open-source the communications / transport code for FaceTime, which initially had a distributed user-to-user architecture. They got hit with a copyright suit for that, and ended up rebuilding it to use a more centralized architecture, where lots of data has to flow through Apple's servers. The lack of open-source code has kept there from being compatible clients up to this point (so all that code for other platforms would have to be written from scratch starting now), and also means there's a cost involved in supporting all those non-Apple users (server costs and such). Apple users have already paid in for this (they spent a bunch on iPhones / iPads / Macs - the so-called "Apple Tax"), but with non-Apple users (Windows / Android), Apple would have to either eat the ongoing costs, or charge up-front for use, which would cause most of the potential userbase to say, "but Zoom / Messenger / Hangouts / whatever is
freeeee!, why should we
pay for FaceTime?" (yes, with those other "free" soluctions, they are the product, but they either don't know or don't care).
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I never heard someone say let’s FaceTime. People here say let’s Skype, even though nobody uses Skype anymore. LOL. We all use WhatsApp because everybody in Europe has it.
As a counterpoint, not only do I hear people request to "FaceTime" here (barely ever hear requests to "Skype"), but I've been surprised by hearing the officials presenting the county's daily COVID-19 briefings recommend staying in contact with friends/relatives "by FaceTime" - not because they think everybody uses iPhones, but because many do and it's such a common term for such small-group videoconferencing.
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You have a funny definition of the word, "easy".