How to Build a Video Chat app Like WeChat?

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Video chat apps

offer convenience and ability to talk to someone else face-to-face. Yes, you can communicate by voice calls, texts, e-mails, mails etc. But none of these can compare or substitute that incredible feeling when you see the face of your loved one...

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Find the full article “How Much Does it Cost to Build a Video Chat app Like WeChat?” on our blog

What do you need to do?First of all, believe in yourself and be bold, put all your heart into this idea.

And secondly... Prepare to be involved in the time-consuming and costly video chat app development and its marketing campaign.Custom video chat app development is a booming industry, but there is still plenty of opportunities for you to make a fortune, believe me.

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First Base

Functionality & FeaturesThis is your must-have if you want to beat your

competitors, so get yourself a pen and piece of paper

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■ It’s establishing real audio-video communication along with instant messaging for the users providing live video stream.

■ The app usually has four scripts: client, server, video feed and video socket.

■ The app works only when there is a reliable internet connection.

■ Chat app can’t establish a connection itself, but assists other media in effective communication.

■ Video chat app utilizes web conferencing for video streaming.

Based on the tasks of functionality Video Chat app’s working process depends on the web conference and push technology.

Basics of video chat app functionality

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The main video chat app features that you absolutely need:

1. User Registration & Profile with the avatar option & Account management

2. User Status & Adding friends & Search Users & Contact management

3. File sharing options & Social Integration with other media resources

4. Online Presence of other users5. Messages exchanging with location sharing integration &

Delivery and reading confirmations & Self-destructing messages

The main app features that you need

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The main app features that you need

6. Geofilters & Geolocation integration

7. Video and Voice Calls

8. Video Chats & Group calls

9. Payment System & Monetization

10. Event management and calendar synchronization

11. End-to-end conversation encryption & Encrypted chats

12. Cloud services synchronization & Server backend & Offline backup

13. Support for various data formats

14. PUSH- and in-app notifications about app events

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Second BaseThe Project skeleton & The

PlaygroundAs always in the mobile app industry, a very important

step is to choose the platform or platforms on which your app is going to work properly.

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iOS Video Chat App

If you want to develop your own video chat app on iOS platform you’ll need to use Objective C or Swift languages. We recommend to start with Swift anyway – it’s much easier than Objective C, and it’s a lot faster.

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AndroidVideo Chat AppIf you wish to create a video chat on Android platform, then your option is Java programming language.

You can always search the Internet and GitHub particularly to find many open source projects, video chat app development tutorials, and free quickstart kits. There are plenty of similar apps out there which you can research to have an example on how to design your own app and make it function as a top-rank peer-to-peer video chat app.

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Why is the Web Real-Time Communication your best friend?

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WebRTC is a free, open source technology that provides browsers and mobile applications with RTC capabilities via simple APIs. One of the major challenges for the web is to enable human communication via voice and video without special plugins and payment for these services.

Web Real-Time Communication WebRTC makes it easier for you to develop voice and video chat apps because the full WebRTC package consists of such features as Peer-to-Peer, Data Streaming, Video and Audio Codecs for transmission of live conversations between one or more peers.

Most important fact – WebRTC is easy-to-use especially for mobile app development.

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To make a fully functional video chat app you’ll need servers for WebRTC purposes:

● Users management;● Exchange of information between peers;● Data exchange about media, such as

formats and video resolution:● The connections need to traverse NAT

gateways and firewalls.

Unfortunately, just one WebRTC isn’t enough for a video chat app project. You’re going to need the help of something like wrapper platforms for embedded real-time communication solutions. For example, OpenTok or Temasys.

WebRTC

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“Temasys is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that provides full stack solutions for web real-time communications, an emerging standard for peer-to-peer connectivity, which enables web developers to provide high-quality, low-bandwidth audio, video chat and secure data transfer between users of any application via the web, mobile, desktop, or embedded within an app”.

Source

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How Much Does it Cost to Build a Video Chat app Like

WeChat?

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WeChat is one of the best voice and video chat apps, that is free and works almost on all types of devices. It’s a trustworthy and reliable app not because we say so, but because WeChat has established its credibility on the worldwide scale.

The cost structure of the app will depend on many critical points. Let’s start with the review for the WeChat app!

Cost of a Video Chat app Development

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Find the full article “How Much Does it Cost to Build a Video Chat app Like WeChat?” on our blog

Attractive UI design

Features of the WeChat app:

Group chats with up to 500 people

Voice & Video calls

Messaging

Find your friends option

20 different languages supportYour existing

place

WeChat contacts

Content sharing with friends via chats and their Moments feed

Regular updates

Social Attributes

Enjoyable, animated emotion stickers

Picture posting

Picture posting

No yearly membership fee – the app is completely free

WeChat Payment

WeChat is the only messaging app certified by TRUSTe

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What’s going to cost you most of all

● Features and the core functionality of the future app;● A mobile platform – iOS, Android or both;● A server backend, a third-party services integration;● Social media integration;● Design of the app – the more complex and sophisticated

UX/UI you want, the higher will be the price;● Approach to app development (native or hybrid) – the price of

the cross-platform app will be lower;● Specialists you hire to build your team and number of

developers involved in the project;● Analytic solutions integration;● Post-production maintenance (read more in "How To Start

Mobile App Marketing Campaign").

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The total price of such fully functional video chat app developed from a scratch can be estimated roughly between $30,000 – $80,000.

Plus, you should keep in mind some extra money for post-launch tech support (improvements and upgrades) and marketing campaign.

● Wireframes + UI design - up to 150-200 hours;

● Platform development + backend (depends on a server scalability) – up to 1000-1500 hours, plus PM and QA services.

The cost to make the best video chat app

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To build such app you should, first of all, research the market, study the subject, learn how to code just to know what you’re getting yourself into.

It won’t be easy, but there is nothing that can stop you!

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