What's new in Cosmos Video

Until now a guest got your whole space or none of it, which made inviting anyone in a decision rather than a reflex. Now you choose the rooms they can enter and keep the rest to your team. Host an event on your stage, run breakouts in a few rooms, and leave your team's rooms and chat where they are.

🚪 Space access

Three settings, all under Space settings › Space access.

• Who can enter: members only, or members and guests
• How guests get in: anyone with the link joins right away, or guests knock and wait for a member to let them in
• Where guests can go: the whole space, or only the guest areas you pick, plus your public channels. Members-only rooms ask people to sign in, and only members get through

🎥 Guests arrive ready

Sorting out a guest's mic and camera for them, while everyone else waits, is a poor way to start a call. Your space's landing page does it before they arrive.

• Permissions, sorted: it tells guests what to allow in their browser, on Chrome, Edge or Firefox, and in their computer's settings, and takes them to the right place in as few clicks as it can
• Noise cancellation and backgrounds before they join, including your team's custom backgrounds
• On the phone too: in the new Android app, and coming to iOS

⚡ The fastest route

Everyone joining Cosmos now connects through the fastest route across our servers, so the video is clear from the start. There's nothing to switch on. More on how we keep calls fast and reliable.

The Android app has been rebuilt from nothing as a native app, rather than patched again. Your whole space now fits in your pocket: the live room list, calls that survive a walk to the station, and chat that works with no signal at all.

🏢 Tap a link to join, see who's around, then talk

Any Cosmos link opens the app in the right room, and guests join with just their name.

• Join preview: set your mic, camera and background, then Join or Join muted
• Rooms and people, live: see who's in each room, who's free, and which rooms are locked
• Talk now: tap a colleague and you're talking. No link to send
• Invite to talk: pull someone into your call and see their reply, whether that's Go now, In 5 min or Can't come

🎥 Calls that hold up on the move

Join the standup from the bus, or the community session on your walk.

• Landscape, picture-in-picture and virtual backgrounds: full-screen video, a floating window while you check a message, and a backdrop that's remembered for next time
• Share your phone's screen: show the team what's on your phone
• Low resources mode: weak signal or a warm phone, and Cosmos shows fewer videos so the call doesn't drop
• On the go: switch to sound only and the call uses far less data. It's in the ⋯ menu

💬 Chat that works offline

Your channels and DMs open with saved messages, and anything you send goes out when you reconnect. Threads, pins, photos and typing indicators all came along.

📞 Step away, stay reachable

Set your status from your phone. When you're Available or Listening and someone comes to talk to you, you get a call, even with your phone locked.

📲 How to get it

Update or download from Google Play. Works on Android 8.0 and up. A new iOS app with the same improvements is coming next.

Showing your work shouldn't need a second tool open beside Cosmos. The desktop app now shares sound along with your screen, lets people draw on what's being shared, and runs on Linux.

🐧 Cosmos for Linux

Cosmos now runs on Linux alongside Mac and Windows. Get it from cosmos.video/download.

🔊 Screen share with sound

Play a video cut or a recorded customer call and the room hears it with you, instead of watching you mime along to something only you can hear.

• Share audio: tick the box when you start sharing. Works on Mac, Windows and Linux
• Up to 4K at 30fps, so fine detail and motion survive the trip
• Starting a screen share no longer crashes the Mac app

Share audio works when you share your entire screen, not a single window.

✏️ Annotation that puts everyone on the same spot

“No, the other column” is a slow way to give feedback. Draw on it instead.

• Draw or point: the sharer switches between the pen and a pointer, or turns drawing off to present without interruption
• A colour each, so you know who marked what
• Lines that fade or stay: fade for quick pointing, stay for a full review
• Screenshot the marked-up screen, so the feedback outlives the call

👋 Guests skip the sign-up

Clients and collaborators can use the desktop app without an account. They paste your invite link into the app's top bar and they're in.

🎨 Virtual background, up to 3x lighter

Virtual background now uses as little as a third of the CPU it used to, so your laptop stays cool through the afternoon. That figure is measured on an M1 Pro in the desktop app, so expect it to vary by machine. It's lighter rather than faster: the frame rate hasn't changed.

• Low-performance mode: updates the outline around you less often, to save more again
• Backgrounds for your whole space: admins and members upload custom backgrounds and everyone joining the space can use them. Delete any you no longer need
• How to use: turn it on in Video settings, or on the call join page

A meeting tool only has to behave for 45 minutes. Cosmos sits open all day, next to everything else on your machine, so heavy was never an option.

Every quarter we test it the hard way: real machines, every browser we support, and 150 bots from 15 regions trying to break it. The July run is done and every fix is live.

🏆 Lighter than Google Meet, Zoom and Teams

You'd assume a video call is a video call. We checked.

Same laptop, same five-person call, everyone's camera on. Cosmos asked less of the machine than Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Less CPU and less GPU, not one at the expense of the other.

⚡ Three times lighter than we were

Same test, same machines, 16 months apart.

💡 Mac numbers look bigger than they are. macOS counts one core, not the whole machine, so divide by your core count.

📊 Big calls run lighter than you'd think

A 90-person all-hands asks about as much of your laptop as a 20-person team call. Your machine only draws the faces on your screen, not everyone in the room, so the load stops climbing once your gallery is full.

• 20 people — about 4% of your CPU
• 90 people — about 6% of your CPU
• Sitting in Cosmos all day — about 1.5%

If your machine ever feels slow, turn your gallery down. Showing 12 faces instead of 24 means fewer videos to draw, and Cosmos asks less of your laptop straight away.

🔍 How we keep it that way

Every run works the same way: same machines, same scenarios, everyday actions repeated 5, 10 and 30 times until something gives. We fix what it finds, then run it again to prove it held.

Read everything we fixed in July.

None of this comes from a clever rewrite. It is a consistent method: we show up quarter after quarter and ask the same question, can we do this with fewer resources? Here is how we test.

A status is only as useful as your team's ability to read it. “Away” could mean anything. “Having food, back in 30” tells them exactly what's happening.

So we built preset statuses: one shared set of words for your whole team to work from, flexible enough to fit the way your team actually works.

🏷️ Presets your whole team shares

An admin sets them up once and everyone in the space gets them, so the team works from the same handful of statuses. You can still write your own custom status whenever you like. The presets are simply there, one click away, because setting a status should be as easy as possible.

Here's ours, in all its glory:

You might not know what clauding-clauding means, but everyone on our team knows exactly what I'm up to and how to engage with me.

• One tap sets all of it — your availability, the emoji, the wording and the timer
• How to setup: Admins can “add preset status” through the status setter

💬 Improved status panel

Now works with the keyboard, and built to get out of your way.

⚡ Other platform improvements

• The Windows app now appears in your notification settings, so you can give it permission and actually get your notifications
• Personal rooms now take the right name when you claim one

Two complaints kept landing in our inbox: “nobody could hear me over the building work”, and “I sounded like a robot”. Both were about our noise cancellation, and both were fair. So we improved Cosmos noise cancellation.

🎙️ Now you have three ways to noise cancel

Pick the one that suits your room and your mic.

• Cosmos Balanced — clears background noise and stays light on your machine. Start here.
• Cosmos Aggressive — for the genuinely loud stuff. Stronger, and a little more processed.
• Browser noise cancellation — your browser's own cleanup. The lightest option, works everywhere.
• How to use: Settings › Audio › Noise cancellation. It stays off until you pick one, so go and choose.

And Unedited audio cleans up nothing at all, for music sessions and streaming.

💡 Works on the desktop apps and every browser we support: Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Brave.

🎧 Hear yourself the way everyone else does

No more guessing whether it's working.

• Record a sample — play it back and hear exactly what your team hears
• Input level monitor — tells you when you're too quiet, or not picking up at all
• Noise gate — push it higher and the constant background hum disappears

🎵 Music sounding flat on your AirPods?

Bluetooth headphones drop to low-quality audio whenever they're holding your mic open. Turn on Bluetooth music mode under Settings › Audio, and Cosmos releases the mic while you're muted so your music plays at full quality. Unmuting then takes two to three seconds.

⚡ Performance and reliability

• Input volume now adjusts automatically, or by hand if you prefer
• Fixed a memory leak when switching noise cancellation on and off
• Fixed your camera muting when someone joined a call, caused by a switch between the AV1 and VP9 codecs
• More reliable calls, so you can see and hear everyone properly

It's been a while — we've been quietly shipping. Cosmos now runs 3x lighter on your machine, the browser popout is rebuilt for the way you actually work, and your team can build a space that feels like theirs.

⚡ 3x lighter when you're not in a call

Keep Cosmos open all day without it eating into your browser or battery.

💡 Measured on a deliberately low-end $175 laptop (Intel Celeron N4500, 8GB RAM) — real-world kit, not a gaming rig.

🖥️ Browser popout, rebuilt for how you actually work

Pair, cowork, present — without losing team videos. When using Cosmos in Chrome, the experience used to drop the moment you switched tabs. Not anymore.

• Resizable, properly organised video — videos in a clean vertical stack, sized to fit your screen.
• Every control where you are — mic, camera, raised hand, home desk, and status. No tab-switching mid-conversation.
• Auto-starts on screenshare — present and keep your team in view. On dual monitors? Hover the screenshare button to disable, or pop it back in from the top-right.

🎨 Design a space that feels like yours

Everyone we talk to wants a Cosmos that looks like their own. Now your team can build one using our simple floor plan builder — no handholding required.

• Minimal or vibrant themes — clean and professional, or colourful and playful. Build either.
• Rooms that reflect your team — personal desks, meeting rooms, focus rooms, game rooms, and spatial areas. Name them after the people and projects that actually live there.
• Text and images in the space — team names, project labels, birthday shout-outs. Your choice of font, size, and colour.

How to use: Space dropdown › Floor Plan. Personalise via Space dropdown › Personalise Space.

A couple more things

• Double-click to move is back — if single-click has you jumping across the map by mistake, turn it on at User Preferences › Advanced › Navigation Options.
• Whiteboard and Cosmos Hours are retiring — both are underused and there are stronger dedicated tools for each. We're a small team, and focus matters.

We've shipped major updates based on your feedback. Cosmos now supports different room experiences beyond spatial areas and meeting rooms:

Personal Rooms — your own desk in Cosmos

• Claim any meeting room as yours (Bottom right > "Set Home")
• Spawn there automatically when joining
• One-click return from anywhere ("Home" button)

Coming soon: Access controls (walk-in/knock/do not disturb)

Focus Rooms — library-style silent co-working

• Cameras on, mics disabled
• Everyone shares their work status
• Perfect for accountability and deep work

To change room type: Click room card > Details > Select room type

Control Cosmos with keyboard

• CMD+K: Universal command bar — type any action
• /: View all keyboard shortcuts

User experience

• Each room type has its own toolbar designed for that specific experience
• All buttons now labelled — no mystery icons

Interactions

• Single click to move, and hover to see where you'll move
• Quick action cards for people and rooms
• Sidebar shows all active rooms

Imagine running a workshop where everyone's working on the same Miro board without screen sharing. That's exactly what you can do in Cosmos now.

🔗 Embed apps for seamless collaboration

Launch collaborative apps like Figma, Miro, Google Docs or any tool directly inside your call. Everyone sees and interacts with the same content in real-time — no more "can you see my screen?" moments.

• Launch apps with one click and they open for everyone instantly
• Co-edit documents, whiteboards and designs together in real-time
• Watch YouTube videos with perfectly synchronised playback
• Bookmark your most-used apps for instant access
• Set apps to auto-launch when anyone enters a room — perfect for onboarding videos or essential documents

To get started: Click the Apps icon in your toolbar, add any publicly accessible link, and select "Open for all".

🎤 AI noise cancellation

We've completely rebuilt our noise cancellation from the ground up. Your voice comes through with remarkable clarity whilst keyboard clicks, background chatter and ambient noise simply vanish.

Turn it on: Click the arrow next to your mic icon and toggle Active Noise Cancellation. Pro tip: for best quality with Bluetooth headphones, set your mic to laptop and speaker to headphones.

🎨 Custom video backgrounds

Stay professional on every call whilst keeping your privacy. Choose from our curated backgrounds or upload your own. Team admins can even share branded backgrounds across the workspace for polished client presentations.

Set it up: Go to User Preferences › Audio & Video › Upload your image. Choose whether to keep it personal or share with your entire space.

The moment you've all been waiting for has arrived! Starting breakouts during workshops, team sessions, and collaborative meetings has just got ridiculously easy in Cosmos.

Here's the magic:

1. Click Breakouts in your toolbar (visible for admins & members of space).
2. Set your group size and duration.
3. Hit Start and watch Cosmos do the rest.

No more herding participants into rooms. No more explaining how to navigate. No more coordination chaos. Cosmos automatically creates groups and whisks everyone off to the nearest available rooms.

Want more control? We've got you:

• Manual assignment: Handpick who goes where, or shuffle people mid-session
• Room selection: Choose exactly which meeting rooms to use
• Live announcements: Broadcast messages to specific groups or everyone at once
• One-click return: Instantly bring the entire group back to the main room

You can now easily run breakouts to spice up your workshops, meetings, and teaching sessions.