Zoom

Zoom is no longer only a video meeting app, and its listing says so in the first sentence: it describes itself as an AI-first collaboration platform covering meetings, chat, phone calls, documents, calendar, mail and whiteboard. If you last used Zoom for a call during the pandemic, the product you would be installing is a workplace suite, and its own description is the clearest evidence of that.

You schedule or join a meeting with one tap, send messages to colleagues and external contacts, and use the surrounding tools — docs, whiteboard, calendar — without leaving the app. AI runs through it: an in-call notetaker that produces summaries, drafting help that knows your work context, and a catch-up view for unread messages. Zoom also publishes the widest set of policy pages of any platform reviewed so far, which is the kind of thing a company does when its users are organisations with compliance departments.

Zoom's free tier is the part most people actually want to know about, and it is where this review has to be careful: the store listing is written for buyers of the full product and does not set out what the free plan allows — in particular the meeting duration limit that has shaped how a decade of people use it. The limits exist and are documented on Zoom's own site rather than in the listing, so check the current terms before relying on a free call for anything time-sensitive.

Zoom's history is relevant and it is on the record. The FTC announced a settlement in November 2020, finalised in February 2021, over the company claiming "end-to-end, 256-bit encryption" when it did not in fact provide end-to-end encryption for most meetings — it held the keys that could open them, and used a lower grade of encryption than advertised. The same action covered a web server installed in a Mac update that could rejoin users to meetings with their cameras on. Zoom announced genuine end-to-end encryption for free and paid users alike in October 2020, and the settlement required a security programme with independent assessments for twenty years. None of that settles what Zoom is today, which is the point: it is a company with a documented gap between what it said and what it did, and its four published policy pages are where a reader should check the current position rather than assume it either way. What the listing does not describe is how meetings are moderated, which is unsurprising — you moderate your own meeting, and that is the model.

People who need a meeting to work and are willing to check the free plan's limits rather than assume. It is built for work rather than for meeting strangers, and a reader looking for a random video chat app is in the wrong place.

The most capable meeting product here and the least interested in being a video chat service. The AI features and the breadth of the suite are real, the published policies are more thorough than most, and the practical question for a casual user — what the free tier permits — is one its listing does not answer. Its security history is worth knowing and is public; treat the current state as something to verify rather than assume in either direction.