The world has been dramatically changed thanks to COVID-19. Because everybody is online now, communicating with the help of instant messaging and video chats, this market niche is a gold mine for people who just want a better way to stay connected to their family and friends.

If you are thinking of how to build a video chat app, our article is the right place to be! Here, we'll provide you with some useful tips on how it's possible to create your own video chat apps. We have provided: 

- An overview of the major players in the market when it comes to building video chat apps. 

- Questions that should be answered before one builds a video chat app

 - Three ways in which one can create such an app

Viber is a messaging app that allows users to send messages, share files, hold video calls and feel connected no matter where they are. In addition to messaging services, it provides the ability to easily make phone calls anywhere in the world – making it an essential tool for people on the move. Its features make it a unique value proposition, unlike other similar apps.

Messenger is another app that Facebook owns. First released in 2011, Messenger was designed to connect people who did not have the main Facebook app installed on their devices. Over time, however, its functionality has expanded and it can now be used entirely separately from Facebook. Some of the features that make it unique include video calling, stickers and even an SMS alternative (if you’re not big into or comfortable with standard texting). 

Messaging is one of the most popular parts of social media today, so the fact that there are so many people using this particular app should not be much of a surprise when considering its popularity!

Telegram is thought to be the most secure messenger app around. It offers over 250,000 stickers that can be added to individual messages for fun, and it allows users to create their own creations so they can use them with anyone. Telegram’s secret chats are encrypted by default and self-destructing messages also help it stand out as the most secure messaging app around.

With traction almost exactly on par with that of Tango, WhatsApp is the first on our list of IM applications. Launching in 2009, it’s hard not to wonder why WhatsApp had an ever-increasing popularity rise to its status as the largest IM application. One of its USPs was how light it was on bandwidth at its initial stages making for great interactivity which is possibly why it gained so much momentum almost overnight. 

WhatsApp offers businesses the advantage of being able to create business profiles complete with an about section and a contact page which means that you can reach out to your users via their personal information rather than that pesky corporate number!

Things to consider before starting work on your app 

To make your app a huge success, you need to carefully consider the questions that will help you determine how to develop your app. Below are a few of those questions that will provide you with the insight needed to create a development strategy that will bring you all of the benefits of developing a simple or complex app.

#1 How will you stand out from the competition?

To succeed in the modern market, you should find a market niche that you can specialize in. Your niche should have a demand for a solution that your product or service will hopefully help to relieve. Thorough market research means that you can accurately define what your potential customers need, and then try to see if the features of your product are genuinely helpful towards addressing those needs. If it turns out they aren't (and there's no viable way to make them more accessible), then maybe it is time to reconsider whether this might be an idea worth pursuing?

Before you can position an offer for a target audience, you must know two things: your competitor's products and features; and your potential customers’ preferences within a relevant market. By cross-referencing a chart of "comparison" of products similar to yours alongside a table of how your competitors position their offers in the market, you'll have a good idea of how to position your offers going forward.

Once you have a firm grasp of your app's features, take some time to focus on what sets it apart from its competition. Then figure out the most beneficial feature for your users and display it in a way that is simple to understand. In addition, this feature must highlight how using your video chat app will improve the lives of your users!

#2 What monetization strategy should you choose?

As a startup, it's important to consider possible ways to make money with your app and choose the one(s) that best meet your business needs. 

Advertisements mean a third party company or brand using your app as an advertising platform. Viber is a messenger that offers advertisements as one of its monetization methods. This means that Viber users can see ads among their chats from time to time. 

In-app purchases refer to paid stickers, different currencies for picking them up, and any other type of paying feature inside of your app. For example, while Viber does offer some free sticker packs, users have the option of purchasing more exclusive packs as well if they so wish!

Freemium is a business model used widely for our projects. On the freemium model, you have two service packages - free and premium. Free service has all the features needed to satisfy basic customer needs. But premium service provides access to advanced features which add value when using the application. 

Some apps feature commerce-related fees and others do not. Viber is an app that allows you to speak with someone on your normal cellphone but also pay their phone bill if they happen to be overseas. Because it offers a way to call someone from your computer, most of the main functions within the app is free but Viber Out offers these same capabilities from anywhere at any time for a fee. Funded by donations from users who don’t mind paying for this service, Signal is a video chat app that gives you a messaging platform as well.

#3 What features should you include in your app?

As the examples of popular apps illustrate, video chat apps can have dozens of features. However, you shouldn’t expose all those features at once. It’s feasible to start with a minimum feature set that will meet your users’ most needed functions to see if they are useful and functional before releasing all of them.

To register in a video chat app, users are asked to provide their name and/or nickname. These are usually the only information required at the time of registration (some apps will request your phone number too). Some might consider sharing additional data like date of birth or location optional, but they might be useful depending on what kind of people you'd like to interact with.

Once users have registered in your app, it's important to make sure their information is stored securely and data such as profile pictures and account settings are readily accessible.

Users should be able to find and reach out to friends and family fast! This is why we suggest building a contact list of sorts allowing users of your app to save contacts. If you want to, you can also build a functionality that imports telephone numbers from people's phones into their address books on your app's server or your place on the cloud. 

 Video chatting is popularly used on messaging services such as WhatsApp and Messenger. Since text chatting is generally faster than video calls, install an in-built chat feature for users who prefer it over video conversations or for users who may not have good internet on their device at the time they want to use call.

This feature is what video chat apps are about. Users will be glad to be able to communicate via a video connection, that’s why it’s important to provide high-quality video and audio transmission so the user gets the best possible experience.

This feature allows users to receive all activity in their chats. At the same time, users should be able to mute or turn off push notifications if they don’t need them.

Automatic backups to keep data safe and in line with the latest legislation. It's good practice to allow users access and visibility of their own and all other conversations, and in this age of transparency, it can only do you any favours to have a conversation with your consumers about their needs rather than jumping to assumptions. 

Encryption takes care of your communication safety by offering encryption opportunities to your customers who want them for whatever reason. In the case of chat apps, the level of security measures depends on just how much you feel you need to protect yourself from.

#4 What additional features should you include?

Group video calls. Although not an ideal solution for video chat apps, the option to add more than two participants in a video chat session can improve the overall user experience and will feel more personal and less like a one-to-many type of situation. 

Free stickers don't need to cost anything so long as there is enough variety in stickers available to users.

With support for custom stickers, users can create their own sticker packs of various images and share them in-app. Viber, Telegram, and Signal allow users to make stickers out of photos or other images and make them private (only visible to the user who created it) or public (visible to everyone). 

Masks or effects can help your users make their communication brighter and more fun. FaceTime and Google Duo allow users to use effects on videos they make during video calls.

Geolocation may come in handy for users who need to share their current location or the location of a specific place. Most video chat apps on mobiles have this feature already including telegram, Viber, and Whatsapp. 

You might want to provide your customers with the ability to use your app on their desktops and laptops too! Take a look at modern video calling apps like Viber, Telegram, Messenger and Signal who all offer desktop versions so you can see what might work best for your situation.

#5 How can you build a marketing strategy to promote your app?

A landing page is usually a one-page website that is used as a teaser for videos. You can create this page to tell your target customers about the benefits of your video chat application and leave a form for them to fill out to learn about updates. You can also launch a landing page with an opt-in form, which helps you build a customer base. 

A blog is a great way to grow your business with organic traffic by using SEO on your blog. Viber, WeChat, and Telegram all run blogs to inform their users about new updates.

Social media are channels that you can use to your advantage to spread awareness of your product. You can socialize with users, inform them about new feature updates, answer their questions, and so on. Real-time messaging applications have Instagram accounts so you can let your customers know about competitions or events on their platform which might interest them.

One of the ways that Evernote promoted its client growth was through its referral program. The referral program allowed every user to gain new Evernote customers by offering small bonuses to existing Evernote users. Academic publishers have tried this model as well to further market their journals. You can try out this strategy with your video chat app, and talk with your marketing team about what specific methods they think would work best for you!

The development approach you choose for building your video chat application will depend on three things. 1. Budget 2. The number of people involved in the build process 3. Technical expertise required to build the application

A communications platform as a service (CPaaS) is like an API (Application Programming Interface). It’s like you’re buying the ingredients for making your own IT app, but rather than having to do everything yourself, you’re able to use someone else’s API - only instead of renaming things, CPaaS allows you to convert text messages into numeric strings that can then be put into the API.

Develop video chat functionality from scratch

When developing your video chat app, you need to consider the tech stack, including programming languages, frameworks, databases, and encryption protocols. We’d like to draw your attention to the streaming protocols that are used to implement video calling in apps - it's important because they're an app's foundation when it comes to video calling. Let's take a look at three streaming protocols frequently implemented when creating video chat apps:

WebRTC is a reliable tool that allows you to use your device’s built-in camera and microphone to achieve real-time quality video and audio. It’s cross-platform and supports most modern browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge, and Safari. WebRTC stands out because it quickly delivers high-quality video and audio transmission across multiple platforms with minimal effort on your part.

Real-time Transport Protocol, or RTP, offers fewer features than WebRTC. However, it’s a good choice for multimedia streaming where a little latency is acceptable. RTP ensures end-to-end audio and video transmission by dividing each piece of transmitted data into separate sessions and delivering them in a strict sequence. As a rule, this protocol is used together with the Real-Time Control Protocol (RTCP) to provide flawless data transmission.

RTMP (or, Real-Time Messaging Protocol) can be used for both real-time and low-delay content transmission and is mainly used in live broadcasting to provide high-quality audio and visual transmission. Information is divided into small batches and sent over in three steps: handshake, connection, stream. During these steps, chunks of information are sent to a server, processed, and then displayed on a user’s device. If you want your video chat app to have more individual design features and unique functionality it might make sense to seek out custom development services or turn to open source solutions that let you modify the source code yourself!

A prebuilt solution is a video call app that has been customized to suit your business needs. You can choose from a variety of features in a prebuilt solution. If a pre-built solution doesn’t offer all the functionality you need, you can change anything you want by extending its functionality and adding new features.

For a company to develop a video calling application, a lot of effort is required. It takes time to complete the project successfully. However, with the right planning and development approach, it is possible to create a successful product.

How to Build a Video Chat App: A Roadmap from Preparation to Development

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people are increasingly making use of video conferencing apps due to the efficacy of more efficient collaboration with remote work. A recent study predicts that by 2025, 70% of the workforce will work remotely at least five days a month. If you’re wondering how to build a video conferencing app and take advantage of this new normal in communication, go on reading the following article!

Video conferencing tools have become extremely popular during quarantine, as they allow businesses to work effectively no matter where their employees are. Our favourite video conferencing apps are listed below.

Zoom is a technology company that has been around since 2011 and was founded by Eric Yuan. In 2020, there had been a huge surge in the popularity of video conferencing because of the pandemic. Zoom reached 300 million users per day in April 2020 because there were 30 times as many daily participants within these particular months compared to December 2019. 

Keep in mind that Zoom offers free versions of its service with a 40-minute meeting duration which can be renewed every 40 minutes if no one ends the call first. But premium subscriptions are also available to upgrade to unlimited use at any time!

The meet is a real-time meeting software that was launched in April 2020 by Google. It has made huge strides within its first 6 to 8 months, growing from less than 300 million users in January 2019 to over 100 million users in late April 2019. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced user growth, with 300 per cent more users signing up for the app in April due to the outbreak. The meet is designed to compete with similar products like Skype and has become immensely popular almost right after launch helping pave the way for its further expansion into other business-related spaces.

GoToMeeting is a great online alternative to holding weekly team meetings in person. It's part of the GoTo suite of online apps that also includes GoToWebinar, GoToTraining and other LogMeIn solutions that allow employees to talk to each other from different locations via their computers, smartphones or tablets. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, LogMeIn updated this app so it can be used specifically by healthcare professionals running remote medical appointments and operations. These updated requirements included changes in the security of user data which allow medical operations teams to maintain contact among one another and with patients while complying with government HIPAA requirements.

Bluejeans is a cloud-based video conferencing service made by Verizon. One of the great things about BlueJeans is how easy it is to use simple interactive features like Smart Meetings. Smart Meetings allow attendees to leave meeting notes and takeaways straight in the app.

According to data provided by BlueJeans, their network experienced a fourfold increase in video conferencing traffic in China and a threefold increase across Asia–Pacific region between January and February 2020. Towards the end of March 2020, they reached around 350% of their pre-pandemic traffic levels. 

While many businesses dealt with disappointing revenue declines during this time, most video conferencing apps saw immense increases in revenues. If you are interested in building your own video conferencing app to take advantage of the market opportunity, read on for some valuable tips.

Steps to take before building a video conferencing app

First of all, you need to establish a clear vision of your product to ensure it brings real value to users and you. Where should you start:

Define the audience you’re going to target for your video conferencing app. You can do in-depth research to create several customer personas and an ideal customer profile (ICP) to facilitate targeting. Although a customer persona and ICP are similar concepts, these are different documents.

A customer persona helps describe your target audience before you launch your product. It allows for adjustments to be made once the product is live and gathering feedback from real customers. A sample of a customer persona can be seen below:

A customer profile is also called an avatar. It’s the representation of your ideal user. An avatar should be more than just a photo on their social media page, it should include stats like age, gender, income level and lifestyle. The most valuable part of this exercise is that it helps you to see your product in an unbiased way.

Make a list of your customers who have taken the most successful sales cycle. 

Determine what characteristics they have in common. 

Prioritize the features that are unique to this smaller segment of your market. After defining what makes up your best customers, you should select the one most significant characteristic among them, which will serve as the foundation for creating an ICP template. 

Your ICP should define such customer characteristics as an industry, business size, annual revenue, budget, location and customer base.  You may add other valuable criteria if necessary!
An example of how an ideal customer profile may look:

Developing a customer persona is important in ensuring your SaaS product will be profitable. A Customer Persona is similar to the "fake" personas you may have created when you were in school, but need to contain more information about your actual target market if you want to be truly successful. An Independent Consumer Profile can help identify your ideal client and determine their most pressing problems.

Another thing you need to consider is your application's monetization model (you can choose between the following options) : 

Freemium. This model helps your users get acquainted with a basic feature set for free and allows you to charge for pro features like file and screen sharing and blurring the background. Zoom and Google Meet have adopted this model as their primary source of revenue.

Advertising. A good way to monetize your app is by furnishing it with advertisements. You can do this by inserting ads into the content users view. If someone clicks on the ad, you'll get paid for its appearance on your app. Mobile games like Candy Crush Saga rely on this type of advertising to make money. 

Paid Subscriptions. You can also generate revenue by charging users a monthly or annual fee to access your service once they've tried it out initially for free for a certain amount of time (a subset of folks within the freemium market). Business structures like Verizon use PAYG (pay as you go) model expansion methods for their software product BlueJeans.

The choice of monetization model depends on your needs as a business. Many different things will affect the type of model you choose. For example, if you're designing a product that is more effective for healthcare or enterprise users, you might want to consider a subscription-based platform as it would be most suitable for those types of users. However, if you were creating a service where people have irregular usage habits such as social video conferencing - your freemium or advertising-based monetization model would be best suited.

The next step is to create a plan for your business. The Lean Canvas is a great way to get the whole picture of what you're doing and how you can improve it, as well as notice any weaknesses that aren't apparent just by using the tools on hand. Startup companies use this tool to ask their target audience what major problems they need solved and add value to their lives - in other words, asking the right questions at the right time!

A Lean Canvas is like a business plan for startups. It seeks to give them the structure and reference they need when trying to figure out what they want their business model or their MVP to be. A Business Model Canvas, on the other hand, is designed for established businesses so that they have some form of reference to guide them in taking on various decisions about their growth strategy.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product with enough features to ensure that you can test whether or not your concept has a market value. You should prioritize features that will cover the most common points of interest for your customer base, keeping in mind both needs and wants.

When building a registration flow, you should pay attention to the specifics of your target audience. If you provide your video conferencing app to healthcare institutions, you should implement a detailed registration form that will request information like what OS they would like to use or whether or not they plan on shipping products internationally.

 A registration form for webinar visitors should request as little information as possible. It may include integrations with major social networks to enable registration through existing Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts. You can also offer additional integration opportunities in the form of QR Codes so that attendees may scan them to enter an event with their mobile devices!

You need to make sure you allow users to manage their profiles on your video conferencing platform. Some things they may want to do are: 

Edit personal information and qualifications. 

Create a web page that allows users to check their audio and video before joining a meeting. This web page should allow users to mute their microphones, disable the camera, set the background image, and enable some sort of video feed so they can see who is in the meeting.

One-on-one and group video and audio meetings are essential features to help us get things done faster. Your app should provide an equally high calibre of video quality during a meeting with one participant or with several participants.

Your video conferencing app should allow users to exchange messages since this adds communication channel during meetings.

There are complements features you can implement in further releases. For instance, you can consider implementing file sharing during conversations. Thanks to file sharing, team members can share documents related to the discussion topic and patients can share test results or earlier health exam results during consultations with healthcare specialists.

·       Screen sharing is particularly useful when giving presentations or demonstrating new flows or digital instruments with remote members of your team. It’s also possible to use desktop sharing software that allows attendees on the call to remotely control the computer screen of the presenter. 

·       Using call recording is another feature that adds convenience to your application because it allows specialists who give webinars and online consultations,, for example, to record their sessions using their own equipment but provide them with a video file equivalent to something they know users are more accustomed to receiving from current market solutions.

·       A mute background feature allows you to filter out problematic background noises like keyboard typing or paper shuffling to concentrate on what’s really important. 

·       Background blurring makes it possible for your app users to create the perfect backdrop for video chat meetings, consultations, or webinars.

·        Polling can aid decision-making during team meetings or allow customers to consult with their peers about their opinions. 

·       Push notifications let your clients take advantage of timely reminders no matter if they're taking part in online consultations, webinars, or team meetings.

Video calls must be of the highest quality if you want to impress your customers. Make sure your app has sufficient bandwidth and CPU to support HD video. It's a bonus if your team employs multi-bitrate encoding to ensure that videos play at optimal resolution depending on a user's device and network connection speed. 

Audio quality is key for a positive user experience, too. Engage customers with sound from specially-trained industry professionals - never settle for less!

To maintain the confidentiality of your users’ conversations, your video must conference app support end-to-end encryption. This means data should be encrypted on the sender’s end and decrypted only on the recipient’s end so that no one can get access to it in transit. 

To implement end-to-end encryption in your video conferencing app, you can use technologies like AES 256 or HMAC SHA256 message authentication code (MAC).

AES-256 is a protocol that contains a cryptographic function for securing data. This means the same key is used for both encryption and decryption. AES can be used internally within your business or organization primarily because symmetric keys are more efficient than asymmetric keys and require less computing power. 

HMAC stands for Hash-based Message Authentication Code and ensures the validity of information so only authorized users of private systems may access their databases or assets.

To protect the data of your customers, you need to use encryption. However, encrypting alone isn't enough. When collecting and processing personal information in Canada or Europe (or other regions with similar laws), you need to make sure your product is compliant with the region's individual software security laws.

If your target audience is medical organizations located within the US, you must follow HIPAA regulations to ensure the highest level of protection of your users' health-related information. 

GDPR, PIPEDA, and HIPAA are examples of regulations you need to comply with. The list of laws, regulations, and standards you need to follow will depend heavily on your target audience and the specifics of the meetings your users will be participating in. That's why compliance research is required before choosing as there are several things one can look into from legal concerns to industry best practices.

Now that you know the basic requirements of a video chat application, let’s move forward to reviewing three of the most common ways in which to build the said solution.

Communication platform as a service (CPaaS)

A communication platform as a service is a cloud-based software solution integrating video conferencing features directly into your system. When using a CPaaS solution, you can create a video conferencing app without setting up your own infrastructure and interfaces from zero.

Among the advantages of this approach is the speed of building the application. Since your team uses a prebuilt architecture, you can get your app in front of users in a matter of weeks. In addition, your application won’t require any maintenance efforts from your side as the CPaaS provider will take responsibility for maintaining application performance. 

The main disadvantage of using CPaaS is that it comes with a monthly cost for what amounts to an unmanaged service where you have limited control over critical components such as scaling and security.

If you’re concerned with having full control of your application, custom development may be a better option for whatever it is that you want to build. Video web applications usually rely on a video streaming protocol – one which enables audio and video calls – to function. Let’s review some of the most popular protocols and see how they work: 

Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) was designed originally by Macromedia and has been incorporated into Adobe Flash. Today, RTMP is mostly used for live streaming applications, meaning that it is not stored on a remote server but is streamed as it happens.

RTCP is a streaming protocol for delivering audio and video over IP networks, which is necessary for developing software programs that are used to engage in telephone calls, videos and threaded teleconferences. 

WebRTC is a protocol that enables real-time video and audio communication in the majority of browsers and native clients like Android and iOS applications. Developers from Apple, Google and Microsoft support the open-source project WebRTC and it continues to grow as more companies adopt the RTP/RTCP technology.

Apart from choosing your video streaming technology, you should decide on the programming languages, databases, frameworks, and other technologies to use for your product. By building an in-house customized software the biggest advantage is the ability to build what you believe fit best for your own business models.

 However,, developing a product from scratch also takes time and money which are both needed resources are needed to be utilized carefully.

Using a prebuilt video conferencing solution, you get a complete suite of features that comes with also a variety of capabilities integrated into the platform. 

Since it's a prebuilt, single point-of-entry to an existing solution, it cuts down on the cost and time involved in getting your video conferencing app built. Plus, you can get an application up and running much faster than if you were going to build from scratch! The good thing is that by building on top of an existing solution, developers freed up more time to add in material that'll add real-world benefit for your video app such as designability and scalability - which both increase revenue opportunities for when it's time to upgrade.

Prebuilt conferencing apps in the market do not have many features in common with video conferencing apps in the workplace that are built specifically for businesses, so when it comes to developing your own custom solution all of the time you save by using a prebuilt app is lost in the development process because every feature will need to be added individually or on request.

How to Build a Video Conferencing App Like Zoom or Google Meet

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How to Build a Video Chat App: A Roadmap from Preparation to Development

How to Build a Video Conferencing App Like Zoom or Google Meet