With the increasing number of Smartphone users, messaging apps have become a norm for the industry. These apps help to connect with users located across the world within a short span of time. The field of mobile app development has flourished with the increasing anticipation of users for fast, intuitive, and device-compatible mobile apps. Communications have been made effective and enriching through chat apps like Viber.
All about Viber
As an instant messaging app for smartphones, Viber gained instant recognition among users. This VoIP or Voice over IP app developed by Viber Media allows the users to share videos, images, and audio media in addition to the instant messaging feature. It has over 754 million registered users and 200 million active users. It works on every leading platform and offers multiple features with advanced safety settings.
Features To Be Integrated Into An Instant Messaging App
There are certain app features that you can’t do without while developing an app like Viber. These features include:
Contact and User Registration Page
Mostly, these mobile apps require their users to log in with a registered mobile number and import their contacts from the address book to chat with them. Contact integration features will enhance the overall experience along with additional considerations like using social profiling with custom design features.
Messaging That Supports All Formats
Modern messaging is no more restricted to simple texts. The users now want their messenger services to support various formats of data sharing, viz. audio files, images, and videos through the file formats including PDFs, spreadsheets, URLs, et al. If you want your Viber similar app to have an edge over the existing apps, you must make it more interesting with features like video recording and editing enriched by sound and color filters.
Secured Chats
Chatting is the most important feature of any messaging app. So, you need to consider many significant points before integrating it into your app development process. There are factors like whether you want to offer group chats or only singular chats, whether the app will support public chats or not, should you include high-security chats with self-destructive features, and should you use encrypted messaging technologies to protect the messages from hacking?
VoIP Calls
This feature is a unique addition that can enhance the value of your messaging app. It uses the mobile internet or Wi-Fi to stay connected and allows the functionalities like group calls, VoIP calls, and video chats. To add an extra spark, you can consider adding features like video editing combined with video chats or adding some special effects.
Push Messaging and Notifications
Your app should allow users to customize their notifications. Here, you can use Firebase solutions to cut down the timeline and development costs. The platform should enable the users to streamline the communication faster between the servers and the app. Apart from these, there are features like location sharing, event planning, and calendar synchronization, subscription plans, etc. to be considered in this regard.
Timeline for Development of an App like Viber
The total project timeline may be extended from 1500 to 2500 hours that including messaging functionality taking approx. 150 hours, VoIP calls functionality taking nearly 200 hours, and file transfers taking 100 hours.
Cost To Build Such Feature-Rich App
After considering the features that you want to integrate into your app, you must decide whether you need to outsource this project or hire a mobile app development company locally. The team should include UI designer, UX designer, front-end developer, Android/iOS developers, project manager, back-end developers, etc. Now, considering the timeline and team requirements, the cost of this project development can vary from $30K to $350K depending on the hourly rates.
