Australians Can’t Make Video Calls On Facebook Messenger Yet

iOS/Android: Facebook’s latest enhancement to its Messenger app allows you to make video calls, adding to the existing text chat and voice call features. However, like so many Facebook enhancements, this isn’t being rolled out as a worldwide release, and Australia is not on the list of the first countries getting the feature.

Facebook’s announcement outlines the initial list of supported locations:

Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Laos, Lithuania, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, the UK, the US and Uruguay.

Note the complete absence of any countries in the Asia-Pacific, Australia included. It’s essentially a Europe plus the Americas scenario right now.

You’ve been able to access some Facebook region-restricted features in the past merely by switching languages — that was possible when Graph Search launched, for instance. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case with this latest update. Facebook does say it will add “other regions and locales over the coming months”.

There’s still plenty you can do with Messenger, but right now, video calls in Australia are not on that list. Then again, between Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts and other choices, you’re not exactly lacking options if you do want to make video calls.

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