A chat app is becoming a must-have for a customer-facing service. Today, you can find a chat in almost any area – education, healthcare, finance, eCommerce, dating, gaming. Chat allows users to communicate with service providers or with each other, which raises their experience significantly.
The statistics confirm this trend too. As of January 2023, WhatsApp messenger recorded two billion monthly users, WeChat reported over 1.3 billion users, and Facebook Messenger accrued 930 million users. Collectively over 3 million chat app users world wide. These figures are another proof that the chat functionality is valued by users as an enhancement of the core app.
At the same time, users want chat apps to be as full-featured as possible. They would like chats and messengers to be high-performing, responsive, quick, and to offer a rich user interface. These demands present certain challenges for app developers who, on the one hand, need to create quality products and, on the other hand, have to race the competition.
In addition, to build for mobile means to build for at least two platforms – iOS and Android. All these requirements together can make mobile chat app creation rather lengthy and costly, unless, of course, you opt for cross-platform development.
Benefits of building chat apps with Flutter
If you have set your sights on cross-platform, you should consider Flutter as your development framework. We already discussed how Flutter performs as a development framework, but let’s recap its benefits once again:
- Identical UI on all platforms. In this respect, Flutter wins over other cross-platform development frameworks, as it allows creating the same UI on any platform. In UI rendering, Flutter does not depend on platform-specific components, which results in unique code-sharing possibilities between different platforms.
- Faster development and shorter time-to-market. Flutter can speed up development significantly with its wide selection of ready-to-use widgets that you can just mix and match. Another great thing is the Hot Reload which allows previewing your changes before you actually compile the code. As a result, you roll out a finished app quicker and get a product for two main platforms – Android and iOS – that you can start marketing immediately.
- Native-like performance. A Flutter App does not require any additional actions to render the UI on the device, which results in a super-fast performance that is almost the same as that of native apps.
- Flexible customization. With its wide choice of pre-built widgets, Flutter makes customization much easier and reduces the time it takes to create custom applications that look and perform the same on both platforms.
Why choose a Flutter SDK for chat app development
If you opt for Flutter as your development framework, you are already going to enjoy a number of benefits that it offers and expect to have your app market-ready in a much shorter time. However, you can make development even more straightforward and achieve even higher time- and cost-savings if you consider using a Flutter SDK.
An SDK designed specifically for developing chat apps with Flutter provides a complete toolkit that will help you build a fully-featured app. Typically, an SDK includes the necessary set of libraries, processes, APIs, code samples, documentation, and guidelines – everything that you might need to create a specific application.
Using an SDK in app development brings a number of benefits:
- Faster development and deployment. With an SDK, you do not have to create the entire codebase from scratch. You can reuse the components from the SDK, only adding the customization features.
- Better app quality. By integrating reusable components, you can spend more time and pay more attention to the development of the core features of your app. As a result, the product highlights will be more prominent creating better user experiences.
- Better performance and integration. The SDK components have been thoroughly tested for integration. Therefore, the SDK only includes the features and tools that have proven to perform effectively in a single product.
- Higher security. An SDK often includes reliable security mechanisms designed to protect your product from outside attacks and ensure the safety of your and your users’ data.
Flutter chat app SDK by QuickBlox – a win-win combination
If you are building a chat messaging app or would like to include communication features into your product, the most optimal solution will be to use a dedicated SDK. The QuickBlox SDK for Flutter is specially designed to help developers create and deploy a fully-featured chat app at the lowest cost and within the shortest time.
Why choose the QuickBlox Flutter SDK? It is a robust set of tools, code samples, and guidelines intended for use in the Flutter framework and allowing to build chat apps with minimum effort. With our SDK, you can create an app that has all the main features of a communication product:
- Real-time messaging (group and private)
- Live chat
- Audio calling
- Video calling and conferencing
- Push notifications
- File sharing
- User management
The Flutter SDK by QuickBlox is accompanied by complete documentation, thus allowing you to create and customize communication apps easily. They also provide several Flutter tutorials and code samples to get you started. As a result, you are going to get a rich app that can be used in any industry – healthcare, finance, education, on-demand services.
Last but not the least, QuickBlox builds its development kits with regulatory compliance in mind. We create SDKs that can be used even in the industries handling extremely sensitive data, such as healthcare or banking and finance. The QuickBlox SDKs include all the required security mechanisms and are compliant with all the applicable regulations, such as HIPAA and GDPR.
We invite developers to try and test our SDK for Flutter to see how it can streamline the creation of chat apps. If you have any questions or require additional information, contact us, and our development team will be happy to help you!
