Tom Lee-Gough



Video and Chat Apps

xkcd summed up my feelings on chat apps quite some time ago. The number of chat and video apps out there that cannot communicate with each other is... frustrating.

I wanted to video chat with my grandfather recently. However, he was struggling to find a common app that we could use. He was use to FaceTime, but as I did not have an iPhone, the process was challenging. I did get something going with Jitsi, but that was a one time success. I don't think that he really understood that it wasn't like email or voice - I understand the confusion. Decentralized apps like XMPP and Matrix are definitely the future, but I think even harder for people to understand.

In the end, I caved and bought an old iPhone 6S, purely for video calls. For something so beat up, they don't half hold their value!.