Zoom Workplace

Zoom Review: Forty Minutes, Then the Meeting Ends

The Free Plan Ends a Meeting at 40 Minutes

Zoom's Basic plan hosts an unlimited number of meetings for up to 100 participants, but each group meeting is cut at forty minutes. That single limit is what pushes households and small teams into paying: Zoom Workplace Pro costs $16.99 a month or $159.99 a year through the app, lifting the cap to thirty hours per meeting and adding cloud recording. Nothing else in the free tier is time-limited — chat, whiteboards and one-to-one arrangements continue — but the meeting timer is the product's most famous feature for a reason. Prices are US listings.

AI Companion Summarises the Chat and the Call

The assistant answers questions about a conversation rather than sitting beside it: asked to summarise recent messages in a chat, it returns a dated list of decisions and open items with sources you can expand. In meetings, My Notes builds a personal summary from the transcript, with switches for using the transcript, auto-starting for future meetings and letting everyone in the call use it. Around those sit Team Chat with channels and direct messages, a whiteboard list shared across the team, docs and a calendar — the parts that turned a meeting app into a workplace suite.

Twelve Data Categories, and a 4.1 Android Rating

Google Play lists twelve collected categories, including location and personal information, though it declares no third-party sharing. The store split is the more interesting number: 4.7 on the App Store from 3.2 million ratings against 4.1 on Google Play from 4.58 million reviews, on an app that has passed a billion Android installs. The install is also heavy for what is fundamentally a video client, and battery drain on long calls is the complaint that recurs most in Android reviews. Joining still works without an account, which is why the app stays installed on phones belonging to people who never host anything.