After its short-lived existence as a website, Airtime is now putting its focus on competing with messaging products like Facebook Messenger, Whats App, and Snapchat, as well as the video-chat incumbents Skype and Google Hangouts.

Through integrations with You Tube, Spotify, and a slew of other services, you can drop in text, video, music, and photos and get the attention of group members by sending out what's called a signal to the group.

One of the best things about it is that it’s massively cross-platform and linked to your Google ID.

Not only does Hangouts work great on every Android phone, you can take it to your desktop — even your Mac desktop.

The Speex Vo IP audio codec has also been replaced with Opus, considered more resilient for smartphones.

In short, Signal is evolving from its origins as an app built from bolted-together parts into something altogether more sleek.

Hangouts is Google’s service for both real-time text chat and video.

Apple i OS users upgrading to the latest beta of the famous Signal secure messaging app should consider disabling Call Kit integration if they want to preserve maximum privacy, its developers have warned.

Ostensibly, the big feature in this week’s Signal release for Android and i OS is encrypted video calling, something mass-market app Whats App (which uses Signal’s technology) announced in November.

It also resembles Facebook's aptly named Rooms app, the experimental forum product the company released in 2014 and then shuttered a year later.

The vision for Airtime predates all of those other services.