Group Facetime
Phone a friend… and a friend… and a friend…
Conference calling has been a muchrequested FACETIME feature, and it arrives belatedly but in style in iOS 12 with up to 32 participants per call. Showing them all on screen obviously presents some interface challenges, especially on iPhones (the feature is also supported on the Mac in Mojave). Apple’s solution is to arrange participants’ live feeds as floating tiles in a sort of 3D cloud, with those who are currently talking enlarging and drifting to the front; less active participants are relegated to the ‘roster’, a band across the bottom which also includes your own view.
You can manually bring anyone to the front by double-tapping their tile. A single tap displays the contact’s name, which will be a godsend in virtual meetings where you suddenly realize you don’t know who this person is that’s droning on about the latest Google Analytics data. For less formal chats on iPhone X, you’ll also be able to access all the Animoji and sticker options (see below) within FaceTime, so you can hold a conversation with 32 of your friends all wearing lip-synced cartoon heads. If that’s how you really like to keep in touch. No green bubble friends Setting up conference calls can be quite a pain, but Group FaceTime can be initiated directly from group chats in Messages. Both of these features, of course, remain unavailable to ‘green bubble’ friends with non-Apple devices. That’s one disadvantage compared to the existing group video chat options in Microsoft’s Skype and Google Hangouts, which each allow up to 25 participants on a range of platforms. But if Apple can maintain the call quality and reliability that make FaceTime such a pleasure to use, it’ll surely be the gold standard for groups. We can’t help feeling, though, that the tile interface may be the next Cover Flow: cool to demo, but fatally awkward in its use of screen space.