WhatsApp is the best real time messaging app to connect with our loving buddies. Even WhatsApp is used by school students to receive notifications/events. WhatsApp has extended its facility to Video and audio calls to engage their users. People like you want to build your own messenger app which should reach worldwide like WhatsApp.

Before you build whatsapp clone app , let’s have small knowledge behind this WhatsApp. First, let us have a small statistics on WhatsApp usage growth from its beginning. This remarkable growth has been achieved because of its creative and interesting features.

Technologies To Build With An App Like Whatsapp

WhatsApp messenger is cross-platform instant messaging application. Mnesia is the database used by WhatsApp for storing files which is using YAWS written in Erlang.

Ejabberd

Ejabbered is XMPP(Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) application server. Additionally, ejabberd can run under Microsoft Windows.

Erlang

Erlang, the programming language developed in 80’s finally having its attention in the spotlight.

The Erlang programming language was most appreciated for its performance reasons, speed and scalability. With Erlang, you can build a messaging app with many users and not worried about what they are communicating.

Mnesia & MySQL

Mnesia is a distributed, soft real-time database management system written in the Erlang programming language. It is distributed as part of the Open Telecom Platform.

Mnesia, which is a soft database that allows for store the messages, files, images, videos, documents and the rest multimedia files that running on your app..MySQL is used maintain the user details and other personal information.

Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra Is a open source distributed NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amount of data. The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance.

Amazon S3 Bucket

It is a logical unit of storage in Amazon web services. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Multimedia messages like Audio, video and Images are saved in Amazon S3 Bucket.

Main Features

Registration

On WhatsApp, once the user inputs their credentials, it sends SMS for authorization. Android versions synch the SMS with WhatsApp automatically. We can include Voice verification feature to engage the user attention.

Exchanging Messages

Creating a safe communication channel requires development of such additional features such as encrypting data while sending message from one user to another, self-destructing message history will disappear after period of time.

Recently, WhatsApp has released the convenient feature to send the same message to several people at a time. XMPP technology is used in WhatsApp.

Apart from XMPP, we have dozens of protocols to secure messages. MTProto is a protocol which thought to be more secure and reliable, or Microsoft Notification Protocol (MSNP). MSNP24 is using by Skype. It's up to you which you are choosing!

Notifications – Always Keep us hook

Push notifications is used to know if anyone sends message to the mobile when it is locked. Google Cloud messaging and Apple push Notifications were used in WhatsApp.

Multimedia Files transmission

Apart from calls and texts, users can exchange images, audio, and video files without hindrance. Messengers can support all type of popular formats. Moreover, WhatsApp have inbuilt camera for taking photos and videos without meddling of third-party application.

Location Sharing

Geolocation feature is attractive feature of WhatsApp. For integrating geo-location into app, Google location API for android platform and Core location framework/Map kit framework for iOS apps must be the best solution.

Sharing Contacts

Contact service is similar to messenger delivery, XMPP protocol convention is additional integrated with WhatsApp. We don’t want to save contacts once again in WhatsApp. Whomever of your phone contacts using WhatsApp will be automatically displayed if it exists in WhatsApp database.

Voice & Video Calling

It is one of the best feature which engaging the users still now. It uses Internet traffic. Because of this feature, we can see our loved ones who is in overseas.

WhatsApp utilizes PJSIP library to actualize Voice over IP (VoIP). This library uses high-level API by associating the SIP with framework and transversal functionality.

If you want to be success and engage your user, include additional features like video editing and special effects to the video while on the call.

Settings

Without this feature, application might not get fulfilled.

Profile Setting

Temperamental feature in WhatsApp to change the status/picture and nicknames.

Account Settings

Privacy

Really a smart idea to give a chance to the user to customize the privacy’s settings like who can look up my status and Profile pictures. And another interesting feature is blocking users.

Changing Number

Application would be viable for the user when he changes his number to another number.

Delete User account

It’s imperative to have such feature when the user doesn’t want to use this application no longer.

Live status streaming

Recently, this features attracts many users. Users can update their status through videos, photos, GIFs and messages in different regime. Another attracting feature in text status is fonts. WhatsApp offering different types of fonts.

KPI’s measure to Success

Key performance indicators are often used to assess the successfulness of messengers and its performance.

Number of Active Users
Retention Rate
User Engagement

Cost to Build a Messaging app like WhatsApp

Cost to build your Own Real-time Chat App like WhatsApp will be determined by development team involved. Want to create a chat Application like WhatsApp with minimum budget or high budget? Choice is yours. Summing the overall requirements, the cost might be $55,000 to $60,000 for single platform. If you want to reach your app in all platforms, the cost would be of $80,000 or even more.

Conclusion

WhatsApp got its success through wide expansion. We hope you also will succeed if you are ready to build whatsapp clone app. The greater the features you need, the more you will pay. We provide full development services for building a chat app for Android/iOS from scratch.