A friend recently said ‘I hate (Microsoft) Teams’. While I don’t have the same level of angst, I get it. I rarely use Teams, Zoom and Meet as I use Facetime and WhatsApp for comms and collaboration across platforms – and they’re all free!
Facetime – Video and audio
We all know you can do Facetime video and audio from Apple device to Apple device pretty easily. Well, you can do Facetime calls, individual or group with Android, Chrome and Windows users with just a link for the other party to click.
Read more:
- Overview: https://support.apple.com/en-au/109364
- Create a link for iPhone and iPad: https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/iphone/iphfc9b58aaa/ios
- Create a link for Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-au/102215#facetimelink
Collaboration
If you don’t like the more prominent players in collaboration (Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack and others), WhatsApp Messenger by Meta (Facebook) is very good. WhatsApp works across everything (Windows, Chrome, Apple, Android, etc). There are Mac and iPhone apps; on iPhone, you can get WhatsApp personal and WhatsApp business as separate apps for separate numbers. Unfortunately, there’s no iPad app yet (Meta has been saying for years, ‘it’s coming’.) You can use WhatsApp on iPad via the web: https://web.whatsapp.com
WhatsApp has four main benefits:
- One-on-one messaging, voice and video: https://faq.whatsapp.com
- Group messaging voice and video: https://faq.whatsapp.com/495856382464992
- Broadcast messaging (like a loudhailer but in text for sending messages to groups, but there’s no reply or comment function): https://faq.whatsapp.com/582420703681043/
- There’s similar and additional functionality for business (but not everything): https://business.whatsapp.com in separate apps
WhatsApp downloads: https://www.whatsapp.com/download
ENDS