And when the world is dealing with a global health crisis, that’s really not great.Ĭircumventing Zoom’s dark pattern means keeping your eyes peeled for a tiny text link to “join from your browser” and clicking the hell out of it. Zoom’s approach looks irresponsible, per some critics, as it can result in frustrated participants choosing to dial in to a meeting instead - thereby missing out on the ability to see multimedia content such as slides. Zoom should be shouting about the added benefits of using its app - which does support more features - rather than trying to trick users into thinking they have no choice but to download it if they want to make a meeting. It’s also simply disproportionate to require downloading an app to join a call.

(And COVID-19 has plenty of cyber risk attached to it.) Hiding the option to join a Zoom call in a browser is suboptimal to say the least, given many home workers will be using corporate laptops that lock down app downloads to shrink security risks. Like literally hidden until after you’ve clicked to join a meeting - when the option to join via a browser appears in tiny text underneath a more prominent link to “download & run Zoom”.Įither it’s really terrible UX or a dark pattern intended to drive app downloads. The option for joining a Zoom meeting in a browser is just really well hidden unless the meeting host has tweaked default settings. Beat Zoom’s dark pattern - join from your browser Thing is, you don’t actually have to download Zoom’s app to use the videoconferencing tool it can work in a browser. In total, they estimated Zoom had 12.92M MAUs, up 21% since the end of 2019. It research suggests Zoom had added 2.22 million monthly active users by the end of February vs onboarding 1.99 million in the whole of 2019. Zoom, which offers a range of slick features like auto-transcription and virtual backgrounds, has been a key beneficiary of this viral boom.īack in February, research analysts Bernstein estimated the company had pulled in more active users in two months of 2020 than in the whole of 2019, citing data from Apptopia, which builds models fed by an SDK that tracks downloads across a large network of third party apps.

Work in the time of COVID-19, a disease caused by the coronavirus, is driving huge growth in videoconferencing as scores of office workers go remote and log on to meetings from home.

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