Technology
Table of Contents
After 2020, seamless, real-time communication has become more integrated into people's daily lives. Messaging apps bridge family members, businesses, colleagues, and friends together. Opening one might be one of the first things you do in the morning!
The messaging app market is populated nowadays, yet there is space for innovation. Today, we'll discover why messaging app development is still relevant and how you can build your messaging app. Let's start!
There are undoubtedly a handful of major players in the market for common apps like WhatsApp or Signal, while business communication is dominated by Microsoft Teams and Slack. Still, there is an opportunity to create an app to win users' hearts.
But let's turn to numbers. What is the current state of things in the messaging app market?
One way to succeed in making a messaging app is to craft niche messaging platforms — specialized apps for certain groups of users. Examples include dating, healthcare, business, SMS marketing, social media, and conversational commerce.
Many businesses that handle sensitive information prefer using messaging apps with enhanced security features and might want to build one themselves out of security concerns. The same is true for government agencies, enterprises, and companies dealing with certain entertainment types.
As time goes by, the new user segments also evolve. Today's Gen Z is drastically different from the previous generation in terms of their needs in online communication. According to shopping habits research, 37% of Gen Z purchase the product based on influencers' recommendations, and 43% of them made it via in-app shop and messaging apps.
Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok offer what's known as a "consumerized experience," built around three core actions: capturing moments, describing or commenting on them, and sharing them with others. These communication habits boost the need for modern features like group activities, seamless sharing, AR filters and lenses, and unified social feeds. The well-known names on the market may not meet that need.
The messaging app development process is similar to creating any other mobile application. Check what steps you should not overlook.
It all starts with a bright insight, but it must also be feasible. There are a couple of ways to test your idea: whether your product will be in demand without actually launching it, such as fundraising, demos, prototyping, surveys, ad campaigns, and more.
For example, the creators of Daze, a modern messaging app for Gen Z, just released prelaunch videos on how the future app will work, which attracted potential app users. The app's waitlist collected 156,000 sign-ups and raised $5.7 million in funding.
Analyze top messaging apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal, serving billions globally, to identify gaps and opportunities. Compare competitors' feature sets, monetization models, and user retention strategies.
Check industry data from sources like Gartner, Statista, and McKinsey, as well as analytics tools for competitor research and social media listening tools, to better understand users' opinions, complaints, and preferences around existing apps. Prioritize intuitive design — 88% of users avoid apps after poor experiences.
After thorough research, you should have a clear understanding of the groups your app will serve: is it for personal communication, business, or a specific niche group? Next, identify primary user segments by age, location, profession, and interests. Analyze how different groups use messaging apps and gather user feedback on existing apps' shortcomings.
Determine the scope of your messaging app. Do you want to start with MVP development and then add more features? Or launch a full-scale product? List your app features, requirements, and tech stack.
User expectations for mobile texting apps now prioritize privacy controls, personalization, business tools, and ease of use. AI assistants, natural language processing, and social features are redefining communication and reshaping messaging app design.
Want to stand out? Include features like disappearing messages, payment integration, AI chatbots, and advanced privacy settings in your app.
Outstaffing offers you the required expertise with lower development costs and a quicker project launch. After you decide on the potential development agency, here are the questions to discuss with them: your project cost, composition of the development team, timeline, and the budget that the project requires.
Here are some extra tips that could help you on the way:
1. Find the balance between uniqueness, intuitiveness, and performance: these are the three pillars of great user experience;
2. Consider infrastructure cost: spending on cloud storage providers, on-premise servers, SSL/TLS certificates for secure connections, etc.;
3. Adhere to compliance standards: depending on the region, you must apply different regulations for safe data transmission and storage like GDPR (EU), COPPA, CCPA, HIPAA, and PIPEDA (Canada);
4. Ensure easy adoption and engagement: the app must be intuitive and easy to navigate, including easy but not annoying tips and guides for beginners;
5. Consider your app's scalability and performance: check whether your messaging app has technical capabilities for sudden influx of users;
6. Decide if the app will be cross-platform or native: cross-platform lowers development and maintenance costs, while native offers better performance and access to platform-specific features.
NEKLO has a strong track record in developing specialized messaging platforms, including apps designed to enhance business communication. Here, we'll outline two key projects, focusing on the challenges we addressed and the solutions tailored to meet our clients' requirements.
The NEKLO team worked on Salesmsg, a feature-rich platform for messaging, connecting businesses with their customers via text messages, calls, SMS and MMS. In their aspiration to serve more clients, they faced issues with scalability and performance and came to NEKLO with a request to improve the platform.
The client faced issues with scalability and performance and needed to improve the platform. The main issues included:
These limitations hindered platform scalability and enterprise clients acquisition, damaged its competitiveness and due to errors provoked negative reviews.
Our team prepared a thorough plan for app scaling, performance improvement, and new feature development.
Real-time message delivery is a must-have feature of every modern messaging app. The Salesmsg platform allows businesses to send thousands of messages to their clients via various platforms, and they can do it all at once. The NEKLO team primarily focused on developing stable instant message delivery and notifications, balancing loads in busy periods, and timely notifications.
How we dealt with high message loads:
Whether on a desktop or mobile device, the team ensured interconnectivity and synchronous activity across the devices — when a person answers a call or receives a message on a smartphone, the notification about that call/message vanishes from the desktop version.
First, while scaling and entering new markets, the messenger must comply with each country's regulations and registration procedures. The process can vary for each country and be burdensome, time-consuming, and costly. As Salesmsg is planning to expand to new markets, the NEKLO team is checking new regulations to ensure the platform's full compliance.
Second, as a B2B messaging solution, the platform must undergo anti-fraud checks to ensure no spam messages are sent. In case of suspicious activity, regulators can block the account. To mitigate this risk, our team established a monitoring system that can review client activity and their messages to avoid negative impact and reputation loss.
Before NEKLO began working on the project, the QA and development teams were separate entities lacking communication. We solidified QA and development, making the software development process more effective and establishing transparent communication and cooperation.
NEKLO applied a new test management system with at least 1500+ tests and implemented manual and automated testing. The team uses regression and acceptance testing. Recently, the testing process has been enriched with design review (QA + designer teams) to ensure the best user experience delivery.
Today, Salesmsg is a robust business messaging platform with solid features and functionality, including private conversations, calendar integrations, scheduled messages, canned responses, call forwarding, etc.
The platform allows sending messages, images, voice messages, links, and gifs through different platforms — CRM widgets, extensions, and mobile apps. The client, operating in the USA and Canada, plans to expand their services to Australian and European markets.
Another NEKLO project on building a messaging app, is Call Loop — business messaging platform, that allows businesses to send mass messages (SMS and voice broadcasts) to their customers. The client faced challenges in switching the platform to modern technologies, and asked NEKLO for assistance.
The client's solution, Call Loop 1.0, reached technological limitations and did not meet business needs in terms of scalability, performance, and user experience.
The main issues included:
The maintenance of the 1.0 version required a lot of effort, and its unstable performance led to customer dissatisfaction and negative feedback.
Our team developed the Call Loop 2.0 version, introducing new backend architecture, refined old functionality and new custom features.
NEKLO redesigned the whole application, essentially rebuilding it with new technologies. Our team introduced a service-oriented approach in architecture, separating the platform's functionality into 3 main services: Config Service, Billing Service, and Lambda Layer.
Each service is responsible for its domain, and it helps with proper component integration and easier maintenance. The services interact using the HTTP protocol or asynchronous queues via AWS SQS, reducing integration challenges and creating a more cohesive and reliable system. New architecture enhances the app's scalability, efficiency, and performance.
Our team developed lucrative features to improve user experience and business outcomes and widen clients' outreach. We created and implemented marketing-centered features, introduced analytics and reporting capabilities, and provided CRM and other tool integrations. Custom features developed by NEKLO included voice broadcasts, bulk SMS messaging, voicemail drops, and autoresponders.
The project is currently in active development, focusing on customer migration and expanding the app's functionality. Call Loop operates in the US and Canada, with plans to extend its reach to Europe and Australia. Our team supports the client in managing regulatory compliance by implementing the necessary data protection laws and regulations tailored to each region.
There are two types of features you can implement when creating an app:
Basic features form the core functionality of every messaging app, ensuring its primary goal — communication. These features include registration and authentication, message text field, conversation window, contact list, etc.
However, offering just the basic features is no longer enough to stand out on the market. Advanced features can enhance user experience and allow more flexibility in communication types and forms.
Examples:
Messaging app development requires evaluating the pros and cons of coding languages, databases, cloud storage, APIs, transmission protocols, and more. Let's take a closer look!
For messaging app development, weigh up each language's pros and cons and align it with your business goals and app characteristics (enterprise platform, web or mobile app, etc.) Here is a list of languages and their basic features to consider.
Create a messaging app with the language that suits your requirements, considering key characteristics and strong and weak points. Overall, there are some general guidelines for choosing the language:
When you build a messaging app, the most commonly used databases to consider are MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.
Cloud services allow you to store your customers' media files, like images and video, and even make your future messaging app infrastructure cloud-based. The most popular cloud providers include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Each platform suits different business needs, depending on existing infrastructure, required scalability, and specific technological preferences.
Messaging APIs handle core functionalities such as sending and receiving messages, managing users and notifications, and integrating with other services. Depending on their function, several types of APIs are used in messaging app development: authentication, messaging, notification, data storage, payment APIs, the ones that manage users' information, and the ones for analytics. You can either use one of the existing solutions on the market or build a custom one.
Integrate a payment gateway into your messaging app, allowing users to make in-app purchases and service bookings and automate subscription billing processes. Peer-to-peer transactions encompass small transaction fees or service charges that accumulate, impacting revenue. Payment gateway integration is also used for targeted advertising within the app.
Common payment gateways include Stripe, Square, Braintree, Adyen, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
Push notifications in mobile messaging apps allow users to stay informed about the app's news and updates, and help to boost user retention. They are also used for verifications, in-app payments, and marketing purposes. Push notifications are mobile-first by nature — let's explore the technology behind the most popular mobile platforms.
Data transmission protocols handle data — such as messages, audio, and video — between chat participants, making them vital to messaging app development.
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an XML protocol designed for real-time messaging. It is decentralized, secure, flexible, and extensible, making it a great choice for building a messaging app. It suits group chats, text, audio, and video messaging. The drawbacks of the XMPP protocol include the lack of a QoS mechanism, higher overhead from text-based XML communication, asynchronous XML transport, and potential server overload due to presence and messaging.
Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is ideal for connecting remote devices, initially designed for IoT messaging. It is lightweight, efficient, scalable, and secure. It provides reliable message delivery and simplifies asynchronous communication. The disadvantages are limited security, challenges with large-scale systems, difficulty handling large payloads, broker dependency, and reliance on external setups for advanced features.
WebSockets is a protocol that opens two-way interactive communication between client and server, enabling real-time communication. It is scalable, efficient, and low latency. Modern browsers and platforms support the protocol. Nevertheless, it is resource-intensive and complex to implement the protocol with limited compatibility with legacy systems. If not properly managed, potential security vulnerabilities may arise.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol that establishes, receives, maintains, and finishes multimedia sessions like instant messaging and audio or video calls. The solution is scalable, flexible, interoperable, cost-effective, and does not rely on a central server. However, issues associated with security, complexity, and quality of service need careful consideration before =its implementation.
Real-Time Protocol (RTP) is another network protocol for real-time multimedia data transmission that is suitable for making a messaging app. It supports multiple streams, such as audio and video, within the same session. It has sequence numbers for packet sequence restoration, loose detection, and timestamps to synchronize streams. The potential issues include reliability, security, and network congestion.
In a centralized chat system, all messages and interactions pass through a central server. The server acts as a central data hub for all messages and interactions and functionality around them — user authentication, message delivery, and data storage. Such an architecture is often preferred by developers, as it is easy to build, deploy, and manage.
However, this architecture has its drawbacks. If the central server experiences an issue, the whole system may become inaccessible. Furthermore, insufficient security measures could expose the system to vulnerabilities, such as exposure of sensitive data, impacting many users.
Examples: Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp
A decentralized chat system uses peer-to-peer (P2P) or blockchain technologies to exchange data either directly between users or across multiple nodes in a network. Such architecture is more resilient to data breaches, as there is no centralized data storage. The system remains crash-proof: while some nodes may fail, the app won't go down. Moreover, users have more control over their data.
The disadvantages of such a structure include harder implementation and ensuring data consistency, harder development of advanced features in such messaging apps, and potential performance issues.
Examples: Signal, Matrix.org, Tox
A typical team for making a messaging app consists of 5-8 professionals and can vary from project to project. For example, NEKLO's client, Salesmsg, requested a team of 10 people for their complex business messaging platform. As the project grew, they needed to multiply the team 4x, reaching a full-time dedicated team of 40 members. As you can see, it depends.
Here is a typical team composition:
The final team composition is defined by the type and complexity of work, your budget, timeframe, and project requirements. Choosing the right service provider and team is key to developing a messaging app fast and within the budget.
When developing a messaging app, choosing the right monetization strategy is key to generating value. The approach varies based on the app's purpose and audience, such as a business platform, dating chat, or patient portal. Let's explore each option.
Your messenger may include advertisements like pop-ups, banners, or sponsor messages. Carefully handle this monetization method and balance between advertising and user experience. No one wants to use an app flooded with unwanted, spammy offers. Make sure your app design supports seamless ad integration and that they don't annoy your customers. Personalize your ads for better engagement.
In certain cases, you may include digital items like stickers, themes, and other customization options that users can purchase. Whether these are funny gifs or verification badges, make sure you offer exactly what your customers want and expect. Some advanced features that are available for purchase may be AI chatbots, cloud synchronization, or message broadcasting.
You may follow the example of WeChat, embedding the functionality that allows users to make purchases from your messaging app. Integrate a revenue service that enables customers to pay for goods or services directly within the app, eliminating the need to navigate away. Include various payment options for user convenience.
Another scenario is creating a paid messaging app with advanced features and functionalities out of the box and making it paid from the start. The success of this method depends on a thoughtful and strategic app promotion campaign to attract customers willing to pay upfront. Highlight your app's unique features and functionalities, build its name and reputation, and entice customers to download it.
The other way is to develop a free-to-download messaging app with basic functionality but offer subscription plans, where your customers can pay yearly or monthly. Allow your customers to try your new app and decide on a plan purchase. You should primarily consider different subscription options suitable for distinct groups of users. Offer premium accounts enriched by extra features or other enhancements that provide a better customer experience, making communication more enjoyable.
Sponsorship is a predictable and stable income source that gives pricing flexibility and strengthens brand partnerships. Promote other brands' special deals or share exclusive content through your app. Create sponsor's brand awareness through sponsored app sections, banners, and engagements. Ensure it blends well with your app's original content.
In-game purchases are where additional revenue generation opportunities emerge. For instance, many popular messaging apps, like KakaoTalk, Line, or Facebook Messenger, have in-app games that users can play with their friends during calls. This monetization approach not only helps to expand your services to a wider audience but also gain revenues through virtual currency, items, and customizations.
Current trends:
Inclusive design, voice control screen readers, transcripts, and captions for audio and visual content are ways to make a messaging app more widely used and improve accessibility. Additionally, adjustable text size and high-contrast colors, as well as access to assistive technologies, will make your app easier to use.
To improve user experience, you may include speech recognition features, shortcut keys, captions for voice messages, input error identification, and more. Accessibility features that help to improve user experience, win customers' loyalty and trust, and expand your outreach. You can find more about accessibility for messaging apps in the specialized guidelines.
Current messaging applications face common challenges, such as security concerns, a lack of personalization, flawed design, excessive in-app ads, low performance, and a lack of control for business communication. Consider these shortcomings while building your own solution.
Messaging app development time depends on the project's size, budget, and requirements. Generally, the team takes 3-5 months to create an MVP, but the timeframe can vary. You can use a dedicated team to boost the development time, which takes less to assemble than launching an in-house project and determine the app's business and functional requirements in advance.
Messaging app development encompasses many opportunities for implementing modern features, integrations, and monetization methods. Niche messaging apps for businesses, enterprises, or communities are the most preferable way to enter the market.
The development process may encounter certain challenges, such as high latency in message delivery, security and compliance issues, and simultaneous message delivery across multiple devices. That is why it is vital to find a seasoned development team to bring your project to life.
With extensive experience in messaging app development, NEKLO is ready to help you build your own product. Get in touch and discuss your project with a reliable service provider.
US-based and operating globally, NEKLO spearheads digital transformation initiatives for businesses worldwide. We deliver software solutions complying with your market and legislation.
.png)
