Messaging or chatting apps are one of the most popular and essential app categories of all time. Messaging mobile apps are the most prevalent and reliable form of communication these days. Today, most of the communication between people has become digital as physical meetings and gatherings have been very difficult in recent times. So, to remain close to family and friends, messaging apps have helped a great deal by assisting users in making face-to-face calls and much more. Messaging apps help deliver messages faster in real-time and allow you to view chat history without any time constraint.
According to Statista, Chat/Messenger apps stood second in the chart of most popular app categories in the USA during the third quarter of 2020 by reporting their usage amongst 81.5% of the United States’s online population. This shows how most people around the USA have been actively using one or more messaging apps. There are a number of chatting apps available in the market, and to stand out amongst them, developers need to focus on certain key features during the app development. In this post, we will talk about some crucial features that every messaging app needs to have in order to be successful. So, let’s move forward and learn more about these core features of a messaging app.
#1 Privacy and Security
The first and foremost feature that every app must have is impeccable security. Be it payments and banking apps, social media apps like Facebook and Instagram, or ecommerce apps, all of these apps need tight security. The same thing holds for messaging apps, and the developing company needs to ensure that the app will respect the privacy of its users. Every app should promise that the personal chats of users would not be made public or accessed by the company for personal motives. In the past few years, users have become more alert considering the privacy issue and have forced service providers like Whatsapp to reconsider their privacy policies. Privacy is a core concept that gives a sense of security to its users. Hence every messaging app needs to integrate adequate privacy and security features such as end-to-end encryption of personal chats to make the app feel much safer for the users.
#2 Seamless face and voice call experience
Face and voice calling features are the most common but vital features for every messaging app. Today almost every chat app present on various platforms like Apple Store and Google Play Store offers the facility for making video and voice calls. Still, not all apps provide seamless face and voice calling experiences. VoIP(Voice over Internet Protocol) is a technology that enables people to make voice or video calls using the internet rather than regular cellular phone lines. Apps like Zoom are using this technology to provide seamless and unlimited voice and video calls.
VoIP technology provides cheap and better-calling services as it doesn’t get affected by bandwidth constraints experienced by cellular services. It’s important to integrate such technologies in chatting mobile app development that can help create an app that provides best-in-class video and voice calling for a better user experience.
#3 Link recognition
Link recognition is a vital feature that a messaging app must support to stay in the competition. Almost all the leading apps like Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, etc., offer this feature. Link recognition allows direct access to the contents of an external page shared by a person in the form of a link. Link sharing has become a very popular way of sharing information from different websites or apps through the common messaging app used by two or more people. For example, you can share news articles, videos, or music with your friends by clicking on the share option available on websites and apps. Once you click share and select with whom you want to share the content, a link is forwarded to that person. The particular person receiving the message can click on the link so that the app can direct them to the page’s address stored in the link. This feature is called link recognition that allows an app to recognize the link and direct the user to its source of origin.
#4 Group conversations
Group conversations have become one of the highly demanded features these days, to allow multiple people to join a conversation. Most of these applications allow a limited number of participants; for example, Whatsapp allows 256 members to be part of a group, Instagram allows 32 members per group, whereas Facebook Messenger allows upto 250 members. Although each member can share text messages and documents, not all can participate in a group voice or video call. Due to the participant limit constraint, Whatsapp allows eight people to be part of a call, whereas Facebook allows 50 people to join. Every messaging app should support this feature to stand out in the market. It’s also advisable for aspiring developers to increase the number of participants in group calls to make the app suitable for business and conducting seminars.
#5 Provision to permanently delete sent messages
The facility to delete sent messages is a crucial feature that every messaging app should offer. Sometimes people send messages to the wrong people, containing sensitive information not supposed to be shared with the wrong party. In such cases, it is imperative to delete the message permanently before another person sees it. This feature was a little tough to find a few years back, but with rising demand and lots of research, leading apps like Whatsapp and Facebook messenger have now integrated this facility. Every app developer should work on this feature and derive ways to help people send the right messages to the appropriate party and delete the sent message as and when needed. App development service seekers must check the list of top mobile app development companies cataloged by GoodFirms to find the right service provider matching your needs.
#6 Automatic chat backup
Chat backup at regular intervals is very important to ensure that every conversation is stored in reliable cloud storage. Regular chat backup ensures that your data is stored safely and can be accessed on any device. Many people don’t practice regular chat backup; hence, they lose all the chat history and related data, i.e., documents and media, if something happens to their devices. But in the same circumstances, a person whose messaging app data is regularly backed up in cloud storage such as Google Drive or iCloud should not fear losing any piece of data. It is advisable to app developers to facilitate automatic chat backup and support various reliable cloud storage services. Automatic chat backup ensures that chat history and related information are securely stored in clouds if users forget to do it manually.
Summing up
Mobile apps are slowly becoming a necessity for humankind as we keep heavily relying on these apps for our daily tasks. Messaging apps are the best example of how mobile apps have become an essential part of human lives. Today messaging apps have become the only way of staying connected to friends and family. In this post, we discussed messaging apps and the type of features they must have to become successful and stand out amongst the competition. All of the features mentioned above play a significant role in improving user experience, thereby helping the app gain user trust and succeed.
