Voice Calling feature now available on iOS

About a month after Whatsapp introduced free voice calls to its Android app, the Facebook-owned company has also made the feature available for its iOS users.

Like the features launch on Android, it will not be available to all iOS users at once. Whatsapp said it was “tolling out slowly over the next several weeks”, so you still need some patience.

For a service that has 800 million active users, Whatsapp is already stepping on the toes of carriers all over the world who have seen their SMS revenues depleted by the advent of messaging apps. Whatsapp actually handles more messages than there are SMS’s sent globally each day.

The new iOS update also contains some other features, primarily support for the new iOS 8 share extension which lets users send videos, photos and links to Whatsapp chats from other apps. Multiple videos and photos can now be shared, with an option to crop and rotate before being shared.

The calling feature for iOS is the latest in a stream of updates geared at making Whatsapp more than just a mere free text message replacement. Another introduction was the Whatsapp desktop web client in January, which users can use when their phones are stowed away.