Houseparty

Recently Houseparty has gained increasing popularity, as the outbreak of COVID-19 forces millions to stay at home worldwide. According to a report by App Annie, Houseparty raked in 2m downloads worldwide, compared with around 130,000 the same week a month ago. In 17 countries including the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, it ranks at number one in the Apple app store.

Houseparty goes viral overnight and has already prompted a new set of social rituals.Houseparty is San Francisco-based app owned by Fortnite Epic Games. Launched in 2016, Houseparty has focused on enabling what it calls “shared experiences”, offering in-app games such as trivia or screen-sharing services that allow friends to go on dating apps or watch TV programmes together, for example.

While plenty of apps offers free video calls, such as WhatsApp Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts & Duo, what makes Houseparty special is its addition of quizzes and games, which allows users to have more fun than just sit in front of a camera and chat.

Advantages of Houseparty:

• Accessibility: Houseparty provides users a clean and easy-to-operate interface which helps them enjoy the user-friendly application without any technical bugs. Houseparty will work more and more smoothly with the frequent updates. It achieves 3.4 rating on Google Play given its usability and great features.
• Security: You will be given some specific control to choose whoever you want to chat with when creating video chats on Houseparty app. Houseparty build a secure environment for users to enjoy fun chatting by blocking out those who are not explicitly invited. Meanwhile, users can feel free to ignore the request that people have applied. There are no privacy leaks or other scandals ever appearing in Houseparty currently.
• User-friendly: Houseparty allows the long-distance relationships to chat with each other safely and enjoyably simultaneously, especially for those teens with their friends and family members. Houseparty will be a good application to bring all the people or groups together at the same time.

What should people care about?

• Privacy: Houseparty won’t warn you to use those security filters even though it possesses them. Other people can enter the video chat if users don’t “lock” their chat room. Keep in mind to turn the privacy filter on when going on the video chatting, which will keep the video chat secure and private.
• Danger: One of the disadvantages of Houseparty is that it doesn’t have the age verification. It won’t be a big issue if you chat with your friends or family members. However, people of any age group can be available for the spontaneous video chat since Houseparty has no age limit, which will lead to the strange danger problem. Therefore, we encourage users to set rules for the chatting room when getting in touch with their friends.