What it takes to build a realtime chat or messaging app

Creating a live chat app requires careful consideration of features, communication protocols, and infrastructure decisions. Key foundations for successful chat or messaging apps include low latency data delivery, message delivery guarantees, scalability, elasticity, and reliability. Core chat features include authentication and authorization, access to contacts, messaging, and message storage. Enhanced chat features may involve edit/delete messages, complex text interpretation, file sharing, audio/video calling, push notifications, read receipts, presence indicators, message reactions, and app updates. The timeline and budget for a live chat app depend on various factors such as the features to be built, team size, funding, scaling and infrastructure costs, and post-launch maintenance and enhancements. Building realtime experiences is challenging and time-consuming, which is why many organizations opt for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers instead of building in-house. The choice between building chat infrastructure yourself or leveraging a PaaS depends on your specific needs and resources. Common challenges in building a realtime chat app include performance, reliability, scalability, cross-platform development, security and compliance, and capabilities to build rich chat features.