Chat apps like WhatsApp and Telegram dominate the app market, which is majorly because of the need for real-time communication. Businesses are increasingly relying on a mode of direct communication to enhance customer experience. This is because instant messaging reduces the friction in user engagement and builds strong credibility.

Whether you are a software developer looking to polish your skills, or a product manager on the hunt for the ultimate engagement solution, or even an entrepreneur with a fresh business idea, this blog will help you understand the process behind building a chat app.

Why should you build a chat app?

If you still associate real-time conversation with informal chatting, you’ve been living under a rock. 82% of consumers expect businesses to respond “immediately”, ideally within 10 minutes. How are you supposed to achieve that? 

Email, ticketing, community, and many other forms of user interaction are getting outdated. Enter - chat apps.

Whether you are looking to build a chat app, or simply integrate an in-app chat feature into your app, all comes down to creating a responsive application that solves users' problems.

• Over 3 billion people worldwide use messaging apps actively, surpassing the social media platforms in user engagement by 20%.
• According to Spectrm, 66% of consumers feel more confident about making a purchase if the business is active on messaging apps.
• According to Hubspot, 51% of users say they prefer to contact businesses via message.

Benefits of building a chat app

Chat apps foster a sense of community among users and provide them with a space to interact freely. Despite the widely adopted usage of chat apps, many businesses have good reason to opt for a chat-based application.

Real-time messaging: To be obvious, chat apps provide users with an easily adaptable environment where they can exchange messages or ideas instantly. The most popular form of chat apps among businesses is online consultation to facilitate conversations between doctors and patients, buyers and sellers, or teachers and students.

Improved customer support: Through chat apps, businesses can provide more efficient, convenient, and faster responses to customer inquiries. This also helps you provide real-time assistance to users.

Increased user engagement and retention: Chat app enables businesses to build and foster close relationships with customers through instant interactions. Other features of chat apps like in-app notifications, discounts, loyalty benefits, etc can help you re-engage users, drive sales, and improve retention rates.

Improve team collaboration: Internal chat apps can help streamline communication among team members. It’s an excellent way to keep the entire team in loop for various projects, updates, and collaboration. Features like file sharing, thread creation, and group chats make it easier for teams to work together efficiently.

User-generated content: UGC is a good way to make your app stand out among the crowd. Creating communities or cohort-based groups enhances engagement and simultaneously helps you commercialize the content being shared by the users.

Monetization opportunities: Apart from facilitating online commerce, chat apps are a good way to monetize conversations through a freemium model, advertising, or in-app purchases. 

Chat apps offer an efficient and cost-effective way to enhance customer interactions, streamline communication, and drive sales. If you are now convinced to build a chat app, what features should you keep in mind?

Essential chat app features

Let’s take an example of a chat-based app like WhatsApp. How many features of this app can you count on fingers? Seemingly a pretty straightforward app, but if you go deeper, WhatsApp offers many minute features that greatly enhance user experience. Active status, typing indicator, profile view, privacy setting, and delete message to name a few.

There is a choice to make. What features to pick among the pool of supposedly countless features? Let’s discuss.

Common app features to consider

User registration and authentication: It’s essential to provide a login space to consumers where they can use their basic information to create a profile. Validating this login attempt with OTP, or any other form of authentication is also crucial to maintain security.

One-on-one messaging: Allowing users to chat privately either with peers, sellers, or experts serves as the foundation of any chat app.

Group messaging: Fostering a sense of community is essential to enhance app retention. Letting users connect with others through groups or channels is a good way to jumpstart conversations and improve team collaboration.

Multimedia sharing: Being able to share images, videos, voice notes, and documents is not a luxury anymore. For any quality conversation, these multimedia inputs work as important pieces of the puzzle.

Message history and search: 41 million messages are being sent every minute. If your users cannot search among these messages, how are they supposed to have a rich experience? Enabling users to revisit past messages and search for specific messages, enhances the app’s usability.

Read receipts: Not so popular among team chat apps, but it acts as an important feature in one-on-one conversations. Read receipts acknowledge the message delivery and improve conversation flow.

Online presence and status indicator: One of the features I love the most about Slack is their status updation. I can share my current status and the team is looped in about my availability. Online presence works similarly by keeping the users informed about other's availability status.

Notifications: One of the most popular features of chat apps among businesses is push notifications. It helps you send alerts to users, and also inform them about the activities taking place in the app.

Advanced app features to consider

If you are starting out with an app and wish to roll out a basic version, the above features would work. But to offer a richer experience to users, it’s good to include some advanced features that many other brands also utilize.

End-to-end encryption: This is WhatsApp’s most marketed feature. End-to-end encryption enables you to encrypt users’ messages and avoid unauthorized access to conversations. This also helps your users feel more confident and safe.

Chatbot and AI assistance: Chatbots are a popular way of automating conversations and handling user queries. This also reduces the need for 24/7 human support and can be used to carry out personalized conversations.

Deleting and editing messages: I am going to be honest, this feature has saved me so many times. This feature provides great control over message content and delivery.

Thread creation: One feature that distinguishes a good chat app from a great one is thread creation. This helps in collating replies to a specific message, making it easier to locate and track.

Message reactions: The ability to react to messages with emojis, is a great way to enhance nonverbal conversations and express thoughts more creatively.

Mute users: Receiving a large number of messages continuously is annoying to anyone. This feature enables users to get more control over the notifications they receive and prioritize the more important conversations.

Unread message count: You have two ways to display unread messages: either by displaying a dot over conversations or showing the number of unread messages. Displaying the numbers directly provides a transparent experience to users and adds to the richness of the app.

Now, that we have discussed the features of the app, let’s dive into the concept of developing the chat app.

Chat app development strategy

This is perhaps the most important part of developing a chat app. 

Objective and purpose

What are you trying to achieve through this app? Is it customer engagement, online consultation, in-app purchases, or streamlining internal communication? Deciding on this factor will help you decide the layout and UI of the app.

Each of the use cases serves customers differently. Having a clear idea about the purpose of your app and what exactly you aim to solve through it will help you formulate a clear navigation system for the app.

Research

This sounds too obvious to begin with, but often businesses underestimate the importance of thorough research.

Researching your target audience and existing competitors, analyzing existing apps, understanding the do’s and don’ts for your industry, use case-specific features, etc. You will find answers to these and a lot more questions after you deeply dig the corners of the internet.

All of this research will help you formulate a better picture of your app’s design, usage, and features. This would also help you to understand the cost associated with creating the app and integrating minor features. We’ll discuss more on this later.

Deciding core features

The above research would have you covered in deciding the features that are essential for your app. Make sure to make your app a combination of essential and advanced features, not too much or too little.

Development approach

Once you have the layout of an app, it all boils down to deciding whether to build it in-house or consider a third-party vendor. Building the backend and frontend yourself gives you more control over customization and security but demands high development and engineering costs and efforts. 

Integrating a chat SDK is faster, easier, and cost-effective, and takes the load off your table. For example, integrating the Chat SDK by LikeMinds will help you avoid the pain of the next steps.

Designing UI/UX of the app

Creating an intuitive application that fast-tracks the app adoption rate is important. The app’s UI consists of features based on many factors:

• User engagement
• User retention
• Ease of usability
• App stickiness
• Responsiveness

How the app looks and how seamlessly it switches between various screens also adds to user experience. To reduce the ideation and creation time of this UI, LikeMinds offers 9 chat themes built on popular use cases that can be integrated within 15 minutes.

The backend

While the front end is what the users interact with, the work takes place at the back end. A comprehensive backend that can handle scale, concurrent users, manage storage, and maintain security should be the focus.

Build vs buy

Whether your chat app would take months/years to build or just days depends on your choice of build vs buy.

Building an in-house chat solution gives you full control and the ability to tailor it to your exact needs, but it demands a substantial investment and continuous resource allocation. This option is ideal if your needs are highly specific and can't be met by ready-made solutions, or if chat functionality is a key differentiator for your product.

There are several factors to consider while building in-house, namely:

• Engineering costs
• Server costs
• Time to value realization
• Maintenance & iteration cost
• Opportunity cost
• Scalability and reliability

We have done a detailed analysis of the cost associated with building the chat app in-house in this blog.

On the other hand, integrating a third-party solution, like LikeMinds, can provide a faster time to market, reduced development and maintenance costs, and built-in scalability. This approach often proves more cost-effective, especially for companies where chat is an important feature but not the core product.

How to build a chat app?

Now that everything theoretical is sorted, let’s explore the nooks and crannies of developing the perfect chat app.

Technical considerations

Frontend client: Choosing the platform of your app is where the process begins. Whether your app will be available on the web, iOS, Android, or all of them becomes the deciding factor for programming language.

Messaging protocols: These protocols dictate how the messages are exchanged between clients and servers. XMPP and MQTT are the most widely used protocols. XMPP offers features like message presence, group messaging, 1-on-1 messaging, etc. MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol specifically designed for high latency, low-bandwidth, or unreliable networks.

Programming language: The language that you use depends on the decided platforms. For example, to build a chat app on iOS, you would use Swift or Objective C. Apps built on Android are generally programmed with Java or Kotlin. Node.js is the most popular to build an app on the web.

Database: Considering a scalable database that can handle large numbers of messages, media, and traffic is important. 

Development Process

Start developing: Once the foundation for the design is ready, you are all set to start developing the app. At this stage, you can choose to either build it in-house or integrate a Chat SDK to accelerate the process.

Testing: Whether you’re building the app yourself or integrating a third-party solution, testing the app functionalities is important. Many businesses sometimes launch a beta version of their app to test new features or launches. Similarly, you can also launch a beta version of your app to test the waters and get users’ feedback.

Launch the app: Congratulations, your app is done and dusted. Now, choosing a deployment strategy, like cloud or on-premise hosting is your last step. 

Choosing a good marketing strategy can help you acquire users quickly and also set you apart from your competitors. 

Monetizing the chat app

Apps like Astrotalk or Headspace are built on commercial models, where users need to pay to use the app. A similar model can help you create an app that offers paid services to the users. 

Another way to monetize your chat app is through including paid features, in-app purchases, and advertising. Let’s explore these briefly.

1. Paid upgrades or features

Limiting some advanced features is a good way of gently nudging people into upgrading. For example, offering the core offering, like 1-on-1 chat for free with essential features, but limiting the message edit/delete feature to paid users can help you generate revenue from existing users.

2. In-app purchases

Providing the users to buy digital goods is another way of commercializing the app. On WhatsApp, many businesses list their products, create catalogs, and facilitate purchases all within the app.

3. Advertisements

A chat app is a great way to facilitate ad placement in a known setup. You can opt to display sponsored messages, banners, or interstitial ads that can be highly effective, especially in marketplace-based chats.

Chat app use cases

Chat apps are everywhere, whether for social interaction or community services. As discussed in the beginning, there are numerous reasons why businesses opt for a chat app. Let’s take a look at different types of chat apps, and who knows maybe they will strike a new idea in your mind.

Conversational chat app: These are the chat apps with social conversations as their core offering. WhatsApp, being a good example of this.

WhatsApp is an instant messaging platform that has evolved to become somewhat of a marketplace. Businesses now prefer to communicate with users through WhatsApp since it’s one of the most widely used messaging apps. It also offers many features to businesses like catalog creation, broadcast messages, shopping cart, etc.

Marketplace chat app: Many marketplaces, and even e-commerce websites now allow buyers to chat with sellers. Alibaba is an example of a successful marketplace chat.

This helps in increasing transparency and conversion and also builds trust.

Consultation chat apps: Practo, originally built as a digital health platform, enables users to consult with doctors online. The users have the option to opt for text consultation or video or voice call. 

A consultation-based chat app can help doctors, astrologers, or even teachers to have real-time conversations with users.

Conclusion

Chat apps enable businesses to facilitate conversation, foster a sense of community among users, and streamline team collaboration.

Building a chat app is a tedious but rewarding task. A well-thought strategy can help you create a feature-rich app that complements users’ needs. You can choose to build a chat app either in-house or using a third-party chat SDK.

Building in-house gives you complete control over customization and safety but is time-consuming and expensive. Integrating a third-party solution is faster, cost-effective, and lets you focus on your users and drive sales.