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Instant messaging and other text-based networking media paved the way for better human interactions, allowing users to send and receive messages in seconds from anywhere in the world.
This paradigm shift has been brought to a new stage with video chatting. There have been fewer IT ideas that can compete with video chat technology’s applications and comfort, thanks to real-time audio and video chat between users.
Furthermore, with the pandemic indicating that social isolation is the most critical safety measure, the best way to keep in touch with your contacts right now is via video conference, which has proven to be the best option for staying at home and collaborating remotely.
And for that reason, we created a step guide on how to create a video conference app. Sit back, relax and watch how you can easily do it with your development team.
Steps to Create a Video Conference App
Step 1. Study Your End-User
It is essential to define what kind of audience you are trying to gather. For example, statistically speaking, more than 50% of all people using video apps are under their 30s. And according to this survey, you would need to add more “visual expressions” in your app. Such as stickers, filters, and emojis.
The designing process of your digital product security is another essential part that is valuable to your target market. Since it does involve lots of business and educational-related people, the privacy aspect is also a significant factor that is important to users. For this reason, you can focus more on cybersecurity and provide security features such as encryption while also ensuring that the video quality is excellent.
Customers choose custom solutions on how to create a video conference app in this scenario because it enables companies and solopreneurs to meet their clients while maintaining contact confidentiality. In the healthcare sector, online banking, and legal practices, it is essential.
Step 2. Determine the Key Features of your App
When you ask yourself: “How to create a video conference app”, there is a range of essential features that must be included. The user experience can be harmed when creating a complex app and attempting to incorporate too many elements at once. As a result, make a list of features that will act as your mobile app’s foundation. The following are a few of them.
User Registration
The registration screen should be the first screen that your user experiences. Users are too busy to fill out lengthy sign-up forms, so keep them as short and quick as possible. Only the most critical fields, such as name, email address, and phone number, can be added. Integrate the app with all major social media networks (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter) to make it even easier for users to sign up.
Profile Management
This is the most basic function, which entails showing the profile’s general user details. The choices range from defining the user’s location to offering a brief bio. Picture view, phone number visibility, and mandatory privacy settings are also available. Integration of in-app purchasing tools, allowing customers to pay with credit cards using the authorized payment system, is another essential profile management feature.
Search and add contacts
The ability to scan for contacts and connect them to the app necessitates the use of two functions: a search engine for easy navigation and quick identification of the correct reference by username or real name, and incorporation of contacts from the user’s phonebook.
Status
Before reaching other users, a process must be in place to determine if it is the appropriate time to do so. Users should have a status similar to other social media apps that indicate their current state, such as accessible, idle, busy, away, etc. There should also be the option to display the user’s online visibility or the time of the last log.
Chat
The best video call applications with many features include the ability to send text messages to other users. Apart from simple conveniences such as receiving text confirmation from a contact to engage in a call, text messaging proves to be an important workplace solution for maintaining effective communication with clients as the software is used for company and enterprise needs.
Video and Audio Calls
Video calls are needed for video chats. On the other hand, voice calling should be supported so that people can connect with friends and family who live in other countries. This feature is helpful since regular phone calls can be costly when made from a foreign location.
Group Calls
People enjoy forming communities of people from their social circles, such as a work department, a school club, or a sports team. As a result, they may have both casual and formal video chats about their jobs and assignments.
It is recommended to create a video conference app for at least 50 users in a group call while evaluating the right video conferencing app for business needs. It will make a big difference in achieving teleconferencing goals more efficiently, but it will also increase the level of app logic sophistication, resulting in a higher app development cost.
Encryption
Establish that the messages sent between senders and recipients are encrypted. The encryption process starts at the sender’s address, while the decryption process begins at the recipient’s. Encryption means that even if hackers break into your app by accident, they will be unable to read the contents of messages, preventing the theft of personal or corporate data.
Push Notifications
If you’re developing a mobile app for iOS or Android, the app should appear in notifications so that you can check it right away if you get a call or a new message by sliding down your phone’s notification bar.
Screen sharing
This is another massive opportunity for you. It allows you to share your screen with lots of people, meaning a brainstorming session and a solid collaboration. If you share the screen with the people to whom you are talking, it will increase communication effectiveness and enhance the consumer experience.
If you have any extended budget in your hands, then try to consider some additional options for your video call app. Such features may include customized masks, stickers, in-app purchases, virtual background, making a call with voice-enabled assistants, sending video messages when the contacts are offline, etc.
Step 3. Make UI/UX Design
It’s critical to incorporate the required UX components into the accepted concept early on in the design phase. To succeed, the user experience must remain the development’s highest priority, translating into a visually pleasing interface and intuitive navigation.
A newbie’s willingness to make a call and use all of the features without difficulty is the checkpoint for video call apps. Since the design’s success has such a large influence on the app’s overall success on the market, it’s critical to consider all possible scenarios for improving the user experience at this point.
Step 4. Development and Deployment
Back-end Development
First, the back-end development stage involves the development team working on the app server, web server, and database creation. The functional center of the app will be determined at this point of the development process.
When designing a video call app, the main focus of the functionality moves to optimization. The app is expected to perform well when dealing with large quantities of data and a high load, which means that the development phase may take some time to achieve flawless results when handling multiple calls.
WebRTC
WebRTC, a technology that facilitates real-time communication in desktop and mobile systems via various APIs, is used by most video-based applications.
It has dramatically matured and eventually grown into a dependable technology because it is open-source and has earned the support of major IT brands such as Mozilla, Opera, and Google. The following APIs can be used to build a simple app that includes video call functionality:
- RTCPeerConnection
- RTCDataChannel
- MediaStream
Third-party APIs
Third-party APIs make it easier to create video chat apps by speeding up the process and making it more straightforward.
Twilio
You might decide not to look any further after seeing this cloud communication platform’s speech, video, and messaging APIs, as well as the interactive visual design and creation builder. Twilio also has communication APIs that significantly simplify workflows and connect efficiently to deliver help during the customer journey.
OpenTok
Any development team can use the OpenTok API to add high-quality interactive video, speech, messaging, and screen sharing functionality to any site or mobile app. It’s one of those businesses that has put its full faith in WebRTC, in-browser video, and text chat. Connecting to a session, publishing a stream to a session, and subscribing to streams in a session are all provided by the OpenTok library.
Wowza GoCoder SDK
The Wowza GoCoder SDK is ideal for developing live video streaming apps. Wowza Streaming Cloud is a global cloud platform and API for live streaming. It’s simple to use and flexible enough to be used as part of a custom streaming solution or end-to-end live streaming.
Technology stack
With the development of any mobile application, you should also choose your preferable technological stack. Which in most cases, it comes to two primary choices: iOS (Swift, iOS SDK) or Android (Java, Android SDK). The tech stack may differ depending on the number of features and the requirements determined by your project’s scale.
Therefore, we highly recommend you to proceed with our service called Product Development Strategy Session. This is a free business consultation, where our experts will analyze and determine a ballpark estimate for your business project. Together we will examine where you can reveal your business idea value and become a unique product. If you are interested, leave your project details, and we’ll contact you within 24 hours!
Testing
The code is tested, and bugs are fixed during the testing stage. The more ‘clean’ the final product is, the more customer satisfaction it provides. Therefore, the greater the chances of releasing a highly successful app that can compete with similar popular apps in this market segment.
What’s the Price to develop a Video Chat App?
As you have already gained enough insight into every single step when you start developing a chat app, you also need to know how much of a budget you need. So that you can at least estimate how much money you need to invest in your MVP. Of course, the pricing does vary depending on the location and the rates for only one platform.
Let’s start with the most obvious one: the number of hours one has to dedicate to creating a chat app. According to the project details that we’ve done for a number of our clients, we estimate around 380 to 420 hours are required to be spent on backend development. While the front end one seems to be capped at 270 to 300 hours. So the total number varies from 650 to 720 hours in total for all core features.
If we’re talking about the total cost for developing a video conference app, it varies from $32,000 to $48,000. All don’t forget that this estimate is just for developing one mobile platform. So consider your options carefully, not to overwhelm your set startup budget.
Conclusion
It is possible to develop a video conference application efficiently, and hopefully, this article will provide you with the information you need to do so. Focusing on the platform and features you genuinely require, as well as implementing the appropriate strategy to meet those requirements, will result in an application that will undoubtedly increase the value of your business without costing your startup life.
Suppose you are completely new to the digital product development process and just want to understand how to implement your new video conference app. In that case, JetRuby might have something for you. Together with our expert team, we develop an essential step for every startup called Product Development Strategy Session. Our business analysts will analyze your business idea, prioritize your essential app features and adjust your current business vision. All of that absolutely with no penny charged. If you got interested, leave your project description, and we’ll contact you within 24 hours.
