The PandaChat App Lives in Your Browser

Yes, but not in a store. The PandaChat app is a web app: it runs in Safari, Chrome or another current browser on your phone. Add it to your home screen and it gets its own icon, so next time you tap the panda instead of typing an address.

People looking for a panda chat app on an iPhone often come up empty in the App Store, and that’s expected, because PandaChat isn’t listed there. Nothing is missing from the browser version; it’s the only version there is.

On a laptop there’s nothing to add at all. Open pandachat.cam in a tab, tap Start a call, and you’re on the PandaChat home page where every call begins.

It takes under a minute, and you only do it once. Open pandachat.cam in your phone’s main browser first; the steps differ a little between iPhone and Android.

These are the standard phone browser menus rather than anything special to us, so the labels can shift slightly between versions. If your camera won’t start after you open the icon, the device answers in the PandaChat FAQ apply here too.

There isn’t one from us. PandaChat doesn’t publish an Android installer, so any panda chat apk you find on a download site was made by somebody else. Installing unknown APKs can put strangers’ code on your phone. Use the browser version and add it to your home screen instead.

A web app also means there’s nothing to update. When something changes on PandaChat, you get it the next time you tap the icon, without waiting for a download to finish.

Whichever site or app you end up using, four questions sort the good options from the tiring ones. We’d ask them of anything that wants an evening of your attention.

Most of what you can install ticks two or three of these. We built PandaChat to tick all four without asking you to install anything.

A lot of people looking for a calling app really want to ring people they already know: your sister, your team, the group chat. For that, use whatever came with your phone. Those apps need a number or a contact before anything rings.

PandaChat is the other kind. There’s no contact list to import and nobody to invite; the person on the other end is someone you haven’t met, picked at random or chosen from Who’s online. If that’s what you’re after, how PandaChat works explains how one of those calls plays out.

Say it’s Sunday afternoon and you’ve already rung your mum. The app that came with your phone handled that video call fine. Talking to someone in Lisbon you’ve never met is the job this site does.

Nearly everything you’d use it for. In the browser you get video, voice and text matching, the Who’s online list, following and messages, Live rooms and the coins wallet. It’s the same site you’d use on a laptop, arranged for a phone screen, so nothing is held back for a store version.

Calls work with the phone upright and the front camera on. The full list of what each button does is on the features page.

Moving from an iPhone to an Android, or the other way round, changes nothing here. That’s the point of the page on FaceTime-style calls from any phone.

The app costs nothing to add, because there’s nothing to buy or download. Calling works the same as on any screen: new users get free matches, more appear as rewards from time to time, and once those are used up, matching uses coins from your wallet.

The details sit on one page: is PandaChat free covers coins, rewards and VIP.