Ability to Video call contacts using the Zoom API and the Zoom Meetings SDK

API and Webhooks
,
1

I’m trying to build an android app that allows users to view their zoom meetings and contacts as a list (both company/external). I wanted to add a feature that allows users to directly ‘video call’ a contact from the list. The way I was doing it was

  1. Starting an instant meeting using the create a meeting API and passing the type as 1, indicating an instant meeting
  2. Then I passed the meeting id returned in step 1 to the Zoom Meetings SDK
  3. Once successfully in the meeting, I used the in-meeting controls API to invite the contact to that meeting.

The requirement is that the receiver must receive a Zoom call, either as a call screen when on their phone or an incoming call notification when on desktop.

I used this workaround since there was no API that allowed directly video calling a contact as far as I could look.

This method works fine for company contacts but fails with the following error for external contacts.

{
    "code": 300,
    "message": "Invalid parameter: contacts."
}

and sometimes,

{
    "code": 300,
    "message": "No valid contacts were found. Make sure the contacts can be resolved and belong to the same account as the meeting host."
}

I had previously opened a similar topic and received the following solution: Unable to invite external contacts to meetings using the In-meeting controls API - #2 by gianni.zoom but, none of these solutions fulfill the criteria of the contact receiving an incoming call. Also registering an external contact to a meeting is also not an option since its only for paid users as confirmed by the following response when trying to pre-register.

{
    "code": 200,
    "message": "Only available for paid users: doQJKuCWSuGgtbaQUaXqZQ."
}

Is it possible to achieve the video calling an external contact (i.e. contacts added by inviting them) feature?

2

No. The current Meetings API and Meeting SDK do not expose a direct contact-to-contact video-call operation that triggers Zoom’s native incoming-call screen or desktop notification. Creating an instant meeting still creates a meeting that recipients must join. So the errors you see are expected.

For the in-meeting participant invite method, Zoom requires each entry in the contacts parameter to belong to the meeting host’s account. An external contact remains outside that account even after accepting a contact invitation, so this endpoint cannot call them.

The practical workaround is to send the meeting join URL through your Android app’s own push notification and open it with a Zoom deep link. That can approximate an incoming-call experience in your app, but it will not create Zoom’s native call notification. Registration also does not change this behavior and requires a licensed host.

For programmatic Zoom meeting participation, Recall.ai offers a Meeting Bot API.