In the era of instant communication, chat apps have become an indispensable tool for connecting with friends, colleagues, and customers. From instant messaging to group chats, these apps have revolutionized the way we interact, share information, do business and build communities.
Whether you're a seasoned developer seeking to expand your knowledge of building real-time communication apps or a product manager with an idea of adding chat functionality to improve user experience and product adoption or an aspiring entrepreneur with a vision to revolutionize communication for a niche community, this article will help you understand and navigate the world of chat app development.
From defining your chat app's purpose to selecting the right technology stack and implementing essential features, this in-depth guide will enable you to build a chat app that stands out in the crowded marketplace.
Why should you build a chat app?
The world has seen an undeniable shift towards real-time chat as a fundamental tool for conducting business. While chat was originally associated with informal communications among friends, family, and colleagues, or within dating platforms, it has significantly evolved.
Globalization and the push from the covid-19 pandemic has transformed chat from a user-to-user communication tool into a vital user-to-business communication channel. Businesses across the globe are integrating chat functionality into their websites and apps, recognizing it as an efficient way to connect and engage with prospects and customers worldwide.
Chat apps provide customers with a direct, convenient channel to reach support agents, enabling the swift resolution of issues. In sales, chatbots allow businesses to engage with potential customers in real time, addressing their questions and concerns promptly.
In general, chat apps encourage active participation from users and foster a sense of community and engagement. This can lead to increased brand loyalty and extended user lifetime value. All these benefits make chat apps a great fit for a wide range of industries and scenarios:
Instant messaging: Though obvious, chat apps are ideal for instant messaging. They can help facilitate quick interactions between buyers and sellers, doctors and patients, or individuals seeking online dating opportunities.
Team collaboration: Chat apps like Slack, online event platforms, and Telegram group chats facilitate effective team collaboration, enabling seamless communication and file sharing.
Customer support: In-app chat conversations provide a convenient and efficient channel for customer support to offer real-time assistance and resolution of issues.
Edtech and training: Integrating chat functionality into educational platforms helps in facilitating interactive learning, online tutoring, and peer-to-peer support.
Community building: Chat apps enable discussions, the sharing of knowledge, and the development of social connections, which fosters a sense of community among users.
Online Commerce: Integrating in-app chat functionality in e-commerce and marketplace platforms simplifies the buyer and seller communication process. It facilitates immediate interaction, product enquiries, and even allows transactions within the chat.
Common chat app features
Most modern chat apps have evolved beyond simple messaging tools. Chat apps can now offer many features with messaging to make users' lives simpler. However, not every app can have all the features in the world. Hence, it's important to understand the most commonly used features and evaluate if you need them in your app.
Essential features
The following are some of the essential chat features you would typically see in all kinds of chat apps, regardless of the industries or use cases they are meant for:
User registration and authentication: Chat apps typically require users to register and authenticate their identities to ensure secure and personalized communication. This may involve creating an account with an email address or phone number, establishing a password, and optionally providing additional profile information. If you're integrating chat functionality into an existing app, it's crucial to establish seamless user creation and connection management with your core app.
One-on-one chats: The core functionality of chat apps lies in enabling one-on-one conversations between individuals. This is what allows users to exchange messages, images, videos, and other files in real time.
Group chats: Most chat apps extend their capabilities to include group chats or channels that enable conversations among multiple people. This feature is particularly useful for team collaboration, group discussions, and community building.
Message history and search: Chat history allows users to revisit past conversations and search for specific information. This feature enhances the app's usability and makes it easier to track the flow of discussions.
File sharing and media support: Many chat apps go beyond text-based communication by enabling the sharing of various media files, including images, videos, audio clips, and documents. The ability to share media provides a richer user experience.
Read receipts: Read receipts confirm that a recipient has read a sent message. This feature can be useful for acknowledging communication and tracking message delivery.
Online presence and status indicators: Helps to provide real-time information about a user's online status, indicating whether they are actively available, idle, or offline. This feature facilitates timely communication and helps users manage their interactions.
Notifications and alerts: Chat apps typically send notifications to alert users about new messages, incoming calls, and other relevant events. This ensures that users stay informed and engaged without having to constantly check the app.
Advanced features
While the features mentioned above form a solid foundation, today's users expect more from their chat apps. To truly stand out and cater to the evolving expectations, consider incorporating these advanced features that prioritize both security and user experience.
Advanced security features: Chat apps that handle sensitive information like protected health information (PHI) or deal with financial transactions should implement advanced security features, such as end-to-end encryption, multi factor authentication, and secure data storage.
Bot and AI assistance: Incorporating chatbots and AI-powered features greatly help in enhancing the user experience and automating tasks. Chatbots can provide customer support, answer frequently asked questions, and personalize interactions. An AI assistant can suggest smart replies and craft conversation starters, reducing the time users spend thinking about responses.
Editing and deleting messages: Chat apps may allow users to edit or delete messages they have sent, providing a degree of control over their communication and preventing unintended mistakes.
Voice and video calling: In addition to text-based communication, many chat apps offer voice and video calling capabilities, enabling real-time audio and video interactions. For telehealth applications, this unified chat and calling setup is invaluable. Patients can schedule appointments, receive pre-consultation instructions via chat, and attend the actual consultation in one place.
Reactions: Chat apps often incorporate reactions or emojis that allow users to express their thoughts and feelings without typing lengthy responses. This feature enhances nonverbal communication and adds a touch of personality to conversations.
Moderation: Chat apps often implement moderation tools to maintain a safe and respectful environment. This may involve filtering inappropriate content, removing offensive messages, and blocking abusive users. For chat apps developed for marketplace and community use cases, having a robust moderation system becomes critical. It aids in preventing platform leakage, scams, and abuse.
Interactive messages: Interactive messages transform conversations into streamlined interactions, opening doors to a world of possibilities. They serve as powerful tools to drive transactions, enhance customer support, and personalize post-purchase experiences. Think product recommendations based on user preferences in marketplace chat, or interactive forms that gather patient information before consultation in telehealth chat.
Features specific to various industries and use cases
Chat apps can be customized to specific industries or use cases by incorporating unique features that address the needs of those contexts, as you can see in the following examples:
Audit trail (for healthcare): Chat apps in the healthcare industry may include an audit trail feature that records all interactions between healthcare providers and patients. This feature ensures transparency, accountability in patient care and compliance with the HIPAA act.
In-chat purchases (for marketplace): Chat apps integrated into e-commerce and marketplace platforms can facilitate in-app purchases, allowing users to seamlessly buy products without leaving the chat interface. This is made possible by using interactive messages.
Data masking (for marketplace): For chat apps embedded in marketplaces, preventing platform leakage (sharing of contact information with intent to do transactions off the platform) is critical. This is where data masking steps in, it automatically detects and hide any kind of contact information being shared - phone numbers, email-ids
Live streaming content (for sports and community): Chat apps in the sports and community realm may incorporate live stream capabilities, enabling users to watch live events and interact with fellow viewers in real time.
Chat App Development Strategy
Once you understand the common chat app features, you can formulate a strategy for building your chat app. As part of this strategy, you should identify a subset of features from this list to incorporate to build a chat experience that's tailored to your users.
01.
Define your chat app's purpose and target audience:
Clearly articulate the purpose of your chat app. What problem does it solve? What unique value does it offer? Next, identify your target audience. Who are you building this app for? What are their needs and expectations? For instance, one might expect a chat app meant for an e-commerce platform to have file sharing enabled to share product images and videos, but one meant for an online community may not need this feature. For a community-focused chat app, stronger moderation might be a more important requirement.
02.
Research and analyze existing chat apps:
Study existing chat apps in your target market. Understand their features, strengths, and weaknesses. Conduct user research to understand your target audience's preferences, pain points, and expectations for a chat app.
03.
Define core features and functionality:
Identify the essential features your chat app must have, such as one-on-one and group messaging, file sharing, and real-time notifications. Differentiate your app by incorporating unique features that address your target audience's specific needs.
04.
Choose a development approach:
Building the backend and frontend in-house provides complete control but requires a skilled development team. Utilizing a chat SDK or API offers faster development, reduced costs, and access to advanced features. For example, if you choose to integrate with a chat sdk provider like CometChat, you won't need to worry about the next two steps of this process.
05.
Design a user interface/user experience (UI/UX):
Employ user-centered design principles to create an intuitive, user-friendly interface that aligns with your target audience's expectations. Design a visually appealing and consistent interface that reflects your brand identity and resonates with your users. CometChat provides ready-to-use UI Kits, which are packed with pre-built chat UI components with integrated business logic that accelerates time to market. These kits drastically cut down the ideation and development time involved in designing and building the chat interface by providing a host of in-built features like read receipts, file sharing, and other components that are important for a chat app. By using CometChat, you're aligning your business with a trusted platform that is already powering in-app communication for a wide array of industries, from startups to enterprises. These organizations trust our robust security mechanisms and have confidence in our ability to support thousands to millions of Monthly Active Users (MAUs).
06.
Develop the architecture and infrastructure:
Ensure the backend architecture can handle the projected user base and growth. Make sure to implement robust security measures to protect user data and prevent unauthorized access. At this point, you can consider using cross-platform frameworks like React Native or Flutter to build a native app experience for iOS and Android.
Build vs. Buy
Along with formulating and following a development strategy, you need to decide between building and buying a prebuilt solution like CometChat that can offer you detailed SDKs and UI kits based on your use case. This can have a major impact on your app's development, performance, and revenue. Building in-house gives you greater control over the customization, scalability, and security of your app. However, it also requires significant development resources, expertise, and maintenance.
Choosing a chat SDK or API is usually a better option for you, especially if chat isn't the main focus of the app you're building (which it isn't, in most cases). You can develop the chat functionality faster, pay an upfront cost to the SDK/API provider (which is usually less than the amount of internal resources you end up spending in such cases), and have access to advanced prebuilt features such as video calling and moderation.
Time and cost of chat development
When developing a chat app in-house, multiple factors affect its overall cost. These include:
Features and functionality: The complexity of the app's features will directly impact the development time and cost. Advanced features like read receipts, typing indicators, video calling, moderation, chatbots and AI assistance will require more development effort than basic chat functionality.
Technology stack: The choice of technology stack can also affect the cost. Using JavaScript frameworks like React Native or Flutter can streamline development and reduce costs because these frameworks allow you to develop a "cross-platform" app, which means the same code can be used for both iOS and Android. On the other hand, if you choose to develop a custom backend and frontend from scratch, or if you decide to go down the "native" route (developing separate apps for iOS and Android), costs can be especially higher, as you'll need to hire a dedicated team of engineers to build and maintain the app on each platform.
Development team: The experience and expertise of the development team play a significant role in determining the cost. Hiring experienced developers with a proven track record in chat app development will likely be more expensive than hiring less experienced developers.
Infrastructure: The cost of infrastructure can also be significant, especially if you need to build and maintain your own data centers. This includes the cost of servers, security tools, and data and analytics tools.
A simple chat app with basic features like real-time messaging, user profiles, and group chats can take around three to six months to develop and cost between $20,000 and $50,000. A medium-complexity chat app with additional features like end-to-end encryption, voice and video calls, and location sharing can take around six to twelve months to develop and cost between $50,000 and $100,000. A complex chat app with advanced features like social networking, gamification, and AI integration can take over twelve months to develop and cost anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 (or more).
While these are just estimated figures, you can use them to get a rough idea of how much a fully in-house chat app will cost you.
Technical challenges involved in building a chat app
So, you've put time into formulating a strategy and estimating costs for your chat implementation project, and it's almost time to get started with the development process. However, before jumping into that, you should take a moment to look at a few technical aspects of the app.
Before starting, you need to decide whether to build native apps for each platform (Android, iOS) or use a cross-platform framework like React Native or Flutter for a unified codebase. While native apps are highly performant and offer access to a device's raw hardware APIs, cross-platform frameworks allow you to write once and deploy on multiple platforms. You need to choose between the two based on your need for native-like performance in contrast to quick distribution.
You should also familiarize yourself beforehand with messaging protocols like WebSockets, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for real-time communication, as you will be using one of these to set up the communication of your chat app.
You'll have to use backend languages like Python, Node.js, or Java for server-side development in handling user authentication, message routing, and data persistence, so make sure to decide which one fits best in your business's pre-existing ecosystem of software.
Even when building in-house, you can purchase a few features from chat-as-a-service providers, such as content moderation or video calling and conferencing infrastructure support. If these features won't be a major part of your app but you need to give that option to your user, using a chat SDK or an API makes perfect sense. When selecting an SDK or API for this purpose, make sure to evaluate all available options based on their feature set, ease of integration, performance, scalability, and community support. We've put together a detailed selection guide to assist you in selecting the best chat sdk from a vast list of options.
You also need to plan for the hosting, deployment, and ongoing maintenance of the chat app. Make sure to choose a hosting solution that can handle the expected traffic and data storage needs of your chat app. Cloud hosting options like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer scalability and flexibility. Implement a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to automate testing and deployment and ensure rapid and reliable app updates.
Chat app development process
Now that you have all aspects of the app looked at and planned ahead of time, it's time to get started with developing the app. Every chat app requires a few important components that you'll have to incorporate:
01.
Client: The client application is the user-facing interface that allows users to interact with the chat app. It can be a web application, mobile app, or desktop application.
02.
Communication protocol:The communication protocol defines the rules and format of how messages are exchanged between the client and the server. Common protocols include XMPP and MQTT.
03.
Connection/relay servers: Connection servers manage user connections and session information, while relay servers facilitate real-time message delivery between clients.
04.
Auxiliary servers: When building additional functionality such as video calling or file sharing, you would need to set up servers to handle them on the backend. You might need to look into setting up a TURN or a STUN server for setting up audio or video calling through WebRTC, or an FTP server for file handling. Of course, you can purchase these as a service as well.
05.
Start with UI/UX design: Focus on creating a user-friendly and intuitive interface that prioritizes ease of use and navigation. Follow platform design guidelines, such as Material Design for Android or the Human Interface Guidelines for Apple platforms, and ensure consistency across platforms. Make sure to design a seamless user experience that considers user needs, preferences, and usage patterns. Conduct user testing to gather feedback and refine the design.
06.
Get into the development: Once the design is ready, you can start working to implement the core functionalities of the chat app. At this point, you will also integrate third-party services or APIs for features like voice and video calls, location sharing, and social networking integration.
07.
Set up a testing strategy: Once a considerable portion of the development process is done, you'll need a testing strategy. A good testing strategy is necessary for any form of software development. You should perform unit testing to ensure individual components and functions work as expected; integration testing to verify the interaction between different components of the app; and user acceptance testing to engage a group of users and test the app's functionality, usability, and overall experience in the real world.
08.
Launch the app: Once you are done with all of the above steps, it's time to launch your app! Choose a deployment strategy, such as cloud or on-premise hosting, and deploy the app to the target platforms. For mobile apps, set up CI/CD workflows that allow you to easily sign and distribute apps to app stores from your codebase. Finally, develop a marketing plan to promote your chat app, highlighting its unique features and benefits to attract users.
This sums up a regular, in-house chat app development process. In the next section, you'll learn how involving a provider like CometChat can make your developers' lives easier.
Chat app development with CometChat
When developing a chat app with CometChat, you can skip time-consuming steps such as designing the UI from scratch, developing the base components and services of the app, and building resource intensive features from scratch. Here's what the process looks like when using CometChat:
Define a strategy for your app: Decide on the app's purpose and target audience. Choose a set of features that would be necessary to this target audience and check whether CometChat supports them out of the box (in most cases, we do).
Create a new CometChat app: This step involves creating and registering a new app in the CometChat dashboard. This is where you can customize the UX of your chat app, if you're integrating via widgets and enable or disable features. You can also choose to add extensions to your chat experience for advanced features such as collaborative documents, live video streaming, and more. You can configure bots and webhooks to set up automations and integrations based on your app's activity. Sign up for the free trial to create your CometChat account.
Integrate the CometChat SDK or UI Kit in your app: Once the CometChat app has been set up, you can now use CometChat's extensive documentation to integrate the chat components in your app. This step requires minimal effort compared to what you would need to do when building something like this in-house. With just a few days of work, you'll be ready with a full-fledged chat experience for your users.
Distribute the app: You can now proceed to distribute the app as you normally would to your users. The app (with chat functionality) looks and works the same as any other app, offering a seamless experience for your users.
As you can see, using a service like CometChat for managing your chat app development makes the process so much simpler. You don't need to worry about maintaining your chat app (unless you want to add features, in which case you can again make changes quite easily), as CometChat takes care of the maintenance of the chat functionality offered by its APIs and SDKs.
Useful resources to build chat app using CometChat
As you embark on your journey to build a chat application with CometChat, having access to the right resources can take you a long way. We've curated a list of comprehensive tutorials, created by seasoned developers, that guide you through building a chat app for different frameworks such as React, React Native, Angular, etc.
Whether you're developing for web, iOS, or Android platforms, these tutorials have you covered. CometChat prides itself on being technology agnostic, working seamlessly across various tech stacks. Alongside these tutorials, you can also use our latest UI kits documentation and API docs to further assist you in building.
In case you're working with a technology not directly addressed in the provided resources, we encourage you to visit our tutorial collection, where you'll find an array of guides and resources tailored to a diverse range of technologies. With these resources at your disposal, creating a chat app using CometChat becomes an accessible and manageable task. Let's delve in!
React chat app tutorial | Angular chat app tutorial | React native chat app tutorial | Flutter chat app tutorial | Firebase chat app tutorial | Ionic chat app tutorial | Javascript chat app tutorial | Kotlin chat app tutorial | IOS Swift chat app tutorial | Vue chat app tutorial
Conclusion
Building a chat app requires careful planning, strategic execution, and ongoing maintenance. By following a structured development process, utilizing an appropriate technology stack, and prioritizing user needs, you can create a successful chat app that addresses specific market demands and provides a valuable communication platform for your users.
This guide provided an overview of the process of creating a chat app yourself and also explained how to use a prebuilt solution from a provider like CometChat. CometChat offers quick-start SDKs and UI kits for all leading frameworks and platforms. Make sure to sign up for a free trial today!
Kumar Harsh