Even as things begin to ease out under the unlock 1.0, as a preventive measure, most of us are trying our bit to stay at home. Work from home is still the norm for most companies. The best way to keep in touch with family and friends is through a video call. And it sounds like everyone is doing it. 

Last month, we had a birthday party on Houseparty, a family video call in WhatsApp, made new friends in Ablo and continued with a team meeting on Zoom. There are tons of apps to choose from, and depending on the situation, we can use different ones based on purposes. From sharing your screen to making new friends, here are some of the best apps for video calling.

DISCORD

It's like a sister app to the business platform- Slack. Although these both have different developers and applications are completely different on the marketing end; they both have a very similar look and feel. Like the platforms, this app supports text, voice calls, and video chat, allowing gamers to use it anyway they wish.

Discord is a free online voice and text chat application which primarily targets online gamers. It lets gamers do the multi-tasking chat and chat with their gaming partners while playing their favourite multiplayer online games. It's also suitable for players in video games because it helps them find each other, play with each other, and chat while they play. 

Discord is more oriented on computer players and is intended to give users the ability to meet and interact with other players, rather than only jumping on an appeal with established friends.

BUNCH 

Live gaming with friends via console is nothing new, but as more live games come to mobile, there's a market gap for better experience connecting friends who want to play together on this platform or share.

Enter Bunch, an app that lets users play mobile games with friends via video chat. 

You can use this group call function to chat with your friends while playing third party games that do not support the capabilities of video/audio calls. A user with the Bunch app on his phone can invite up to eight of his friends into a live hangout session with a few taps.

If you're looking for a more cohesive experience, you can also opt for the built-in games that Bunch supports. These games allow seamless gameplay as you chat with your friends and watch their video feed.

HOUSEPARTY 

Houseparty is a face-to-face networking app that allows you to go on video calls with up to eight friends in a room for a session. But it's more than a video chat as you can share your screen, or play games.

My overall app recommendation comes with a huge caveat. Houseparty has an abysmal privacy policy, I haven't seen this on my own, but some people suggested that other accounts had been hacked after using Houseparty. The company denies this and is offering US$1 million to anyone who can prove it.

But this app is so fun that it's hard not to recommend it. 

Video chats at Houseparty have games built into them. You'll just have to click on a little dice icon in the upper right corner while chatting with friends, and you can choose between four games. They're all versions of popular games from HouseParty including trivia, Pictionary, Heads Up, Quickdraw, and Chips & Guac.

The Houseparty games are really basic; they are simple. So if you get bored in a conversation, you could throw up a trivia game. The games do not have the largest content catalogue, but there are expansion packages- available for purchase, of course.

SQUAD

Users of the Squad can share content from any possible service, including Netflix, YouTube or TikTok - so you can watch movies, Tinder together etc. Looking at the features, this app lets users watch the content by video calling with their friends. Additionally, users can also send text messages right within the app to each other. 

The app is currently able to create these "watch parties" for nine people. Squad has designed a social platform to virtually watch friends on their phones browse through stuff. Teens hanging out while browsing through social media clips have been the most common use case on mobile.

Last year, the service started as a screen sharing and video chat app. The desktop web app also includes dedicated tabs for the content on TikTok and YouTube. The simplified one-screen user interface facilitates things much while eliminating the need to juggle between apps or tabs. It comes with a few bugs while watching longer films. Things for a free app can't get much easier, though.

MARCO POLO

This is not exactly a video chat app. But not everybody really wants to do a face-to-face full-on live video all the time. Marco Polo is an app which works a bit like Snapchat, sending short videos with the option to add doodles, filters and so on to friends or groups. Instead of committing to a video call or posting content publicly to stories, users can send video and text messages to others that they can watch on their own time. 

Yes, we can send videos to Instagram Stories and Snapchat, but after 24 hours, those will expire. Marco Polo lets you listen in whenever you want, saving all the videos of your groups in a timeline. If you wish, you can delete your video, but none of us did that.

It is designed to be family-friendly, so people can send video messages to each other that they open whenever they want, without dominating the schedule of anybody. The team expects to use the app for parents, grandparents, siblings, and close friends to keep up with each other's lives.

Ice T fancies the Marco Polo app. The same is true for Pink, who shouted the app on Instagram, and Amy Poehler, who mentioned it during the appearance of the Late Night. The four-year-old video messaging app has been highlighted by all three celebrities, saying they use it to stay in touch with friends and family while distancing themselves from society.

FACEBOOK MESSENGER

Facebook launched its latest video conferencing feature, Messenger Rooms, which allows video chat for up to 50 people at a time. There's no time limit, and you don't even need a Facebook account to join a room.

Additionally, when you make your call, the room will be available to everyone you're friends with on Facebook unless you change your preferences; not only will they enter your space, they'll see it at the top of their newsfeeds.

Once again, Facebook has recently managed to maintain its popularity and has given other social media platforms a tough competition, mainly due to its tech-driven features.

One of the features that made IT town talk about Facebook now is its 3D-Bitmoji-like Avatar. This feature allows you to create yourself personalized and illustrated versions. You can create your 3D avatar, and send it to your messenger groups and other private chats as a sticker. The avatar feature resembles Bitmoji from Snapchat. 

However, this feature is only available for Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Canada and now the US. We're still hoping for this feature to be launched in India. 

ABLO

'Make friends worldwide' - yep, you heard it right. This app lets you connect, discover and have one-on-one conversations with users from around the world with both real-time text and video chat translation. 

The app also won Google Play's Best App of 2019. 

Ablo is a social networking app that allows people to connect who like to make friends from different cultures and places, with a complementary user interface ( UI) that ensures you feel like you're virtually globetrotting for friends. With 125 miles ('miles' is a metric that the app uses to rank a user), it welcomed us and asked us to fasten our seatbelt for takeoff. It also shows your location on the world map and indicates where the map itself will take you.

The app has an auto-translate feature that allows you to chat smoothly with no language problems. The app says that video calls are also translated into real-time. But I have not been able to test or figure that feature out.

Now you go ahead try them out yourself!