IMPORTANT NOTICE: after having served for five years, Houseparty was cancelled in 2021.
Houseparty is a video chat app that was launched in 2016 by the developer of Fortnite. After a few years in the market, it boomed during the 2020 pandemic, when other social media and video calling apps, such as Zoom, became popular. In September 2021, the company announced the discontinuation of the app, and, one month later, it was erased from the market.
The owners of Houseparty claimed that they were planning on using the resources allocated to Houseparty for new projects. Basically, the app provided a social networking service where users could participate in group chats and had mobile and desktop versions, both for Android and iOS.
Sign In process
Opening an account was simple and straightforward. When signing up, you were asked to provide an email address, your name, a username, and password, your birthday, just basic personal information. Once you had provided your data, you could connect your account to other social media, such as Snapchat, Facebook, or Twitter.
By doing so, Houseparty was able to access your contacts and friends, which made the whole interacting experience easier. Once everything was set up, the last thing to do was to provide access to your phone's camera and microphone, in order to make video calls with other users.
Key features
Houseparty was a video chat app that allowed friends to interact through video calls, but it did not just end there. These are some interesting features that made the app one of the most popular options back in the pandemic:
- Although it was meant for video calls, Houseparty allowed users to play games together, which was, no doubt, one of the key features that made this app so attractive. Some games required a minimum of players, so the app filtered the options depending on how many friends there were in the session.
- When you opened the app, you could see which friends were already connected and available for a call. If a particular friend was not using the app at the time, you could send them a “wave” to let them know that you wanted to chat.
- Once you were on a call with friends, you could send private messages to each member individually.
- Houseparty also included a feature that allowed you to share your screen with the other members of the call.
- Before starting a chat, you could record video messages and send them to your friends. The app would send you a notification to let you know when they had watched your message.
- Houseparty allowed up to eight users to participate in one “room”.
- Since you could connect your Houseparty account to other social media accounts, such as Snapchat, Twitter, or Facebook, inviting friends to a chat was quite simple. When you started a call, you just had to tap the plus or smiley face icon, select the social media app from which you wanted to access your friends list, and select the people you wanted to invite to the call.
- When you created a “room”, it could be private, which meant that only your friends could join, or “public”, which allowed any person with a Houseparty account to join the call.
- Houseparty also allowed you to block the chat you were in to prevent other users from entering the call.
Bottom Line
Houseparty was a great social media option during the pandemic when users were lacking social contact and face-to-face interactions. Nowadays, the functionalities of Houseparty have been embedded in gaming platforms, which was one of the main ideas behind the creation of the app: being able to chat and video call with friends while playing video games.
