Houseparty for iOS

Houseparty for iOS is a group video chat app for friends. Get on and get the party started.

Pros

Easy sign-up: Register with your full name, a username, email, and phone number. You will then get a text with a verification code that you must input within 10 minutes to prove that your number is yours.

Find friends: Enable your address book by granting the app access to your contacts to find your friends. Once your friends are located, tap "Add" and then wait for them to accept you. You're also shown people you may know to add, but it's not clear how or why these particular individuals were selected since we had no idea who ours were.

Easy to navigate: On your dashboard screen, you can create and invite an exclusive group to a video chat under the Groups tab or play it casually and just wait and see who drops in under the Houseparty tab.

Send notes from within chat: While video chatting with friends, you can send a private note to a participant without changing screens.

Cons

Only useful if your friends are on it: Houseparty is a very popular app, but we couldn't find very many friends on it, which rendered it useless when our two friends weren't signed on.

Bottom Line

Houseparty is a fun alternative to FaceTime if you want to video chat with a bunch of friends at any given time.