Posts for Tag: apps

Videoconferencing popularity before and during coronavirus lockdown

Posted In: Technology

Zoom has become the primary video conferencing app over the last few months as schools and workplaces increasingly turned to remote learning and meetings.

Since the shelter-in-place orders across the United States due to the coronavirus in early to mid-March, many things have changed about our daily lives. One of the main ones is that schooling and work is being done remotely through video conferencing apps on our computers, tablets and smartphones. Our kids have zoom meetings with their teachers, parents have zoom meetings with our work colleagues and we all have facetime and google hangouts chats with our friends and family.

I remembered just a few year ago Skype was a very popular app to use for video chats, so I wanted to see how Zoom came to be the most popular app. The animated graph above shows the relative search volumes for 5 popular video conferencing apps from January 1 to May 15th (before and during the coronavirus restrictions on travel and gatherings).

This article implies that the reason Zoom had taken over so much is because it is free and easy to use for consumers. Even my tech-challenged mother is doing zoom calls for friends and classes.

Data and Tools:
Data is from google trends analysis of videoconferencing apps. Data is processed in javascript and graphed using the plotly open source graphing library.
zoom popularity