Have you ever heard about an app that lets you connect with strangers on video, audio, and text? If yes, you must be aware that how much popularity and money these random video chat app are gaining every day. The motivation for building these apps are regular video chatting apps that we use for our daily work or to connect with our family and friends.
The roots of video chatting date back to the year 1927, when AT&T experimented with videophone. After all these years, in 2009, a 19-year-old boy had an idea; why limit the video chatting to only family and friends and he started a website named Omegle that started the trend where you can talk to any random stranger. Since then, this market’s popularity is skyrocketing.
According to TokBox data, there has been over 176% in regular live video usage among the millennials in just under 3.5 years. These stats are navigating you to a trail that you should follow.
There are numerous applications available for the same purpose in today’s market, but one app stands out. The name is Holla. This app lets you connect with strangers on video, audio, and text. An app like Holla is the dream of every young mind as they are always thinking of making more money instantly. And as per the research stats, the dating industry has never failed anyone in doing so.
Let’s Get To Know Holla
Holla, one of the most used random video chat apps, allows users to socialize without authorizing. It was developed by Holla group in September 2016 and had over 20 million+ downloads in Android over 140 countries.
Holla pairs strangers from all around the world and allows them to talk to each other. Just by swiping left or right on different user’s profiles, you can either accept or reject doing live chats with them. In case you both swiped right on each other’s profiles, then you’ll be a match. And thanks to Tinder, we know what happens after a match. You can connect via text chat, voice call, or live video call.
Some applications are free, and some are paid or, as in financial terms, premium. But Holla is neither one of them. This app comes under a “freemium” platform which means you can use it for free until you need additional features. You can get these additional features by paying Holla for a Prime subscription.
A project like Holla has multiple advantages over conventional social media apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Let’s take a look at these advantages:
- This app doesn’t ask for your delegations.
- Their algorithm will connect with a total stranger irrespective of your interest. It has no restrictions on whom you meet. However, it gives you options to select gender and your preferred region.
- This advantage is most interesting. You don’t feel obligated to connect with the person algorithm has brought you. You have the option of rejecting them and accepting them just by swiping right or left.
- It has the thrill of making new friends or dates with an assurance that all your data is secure.
The anonymous video chat app industry reaches different height levels each day, with 400k+ users being added every day. These users are spending the majority of their time on these applications chatting with strangers. An app like Holla is inspiring many entrepreneurs and making them believe that these apps are the future of the dating industry.
Holla’s annual turnover is more than $200k, and companies like these are deep inside the random video chat app market with just an MVP and a few attention-grabbing features. Whether you believe it or not, they have doubled their ROI.
Also Read: How to Build a Video Chat App like Zoom?
How Can You Develop An App Like Holla?
If you are looking to invest your resources in a project that can deliver you a great ROI, then the development of a similar to Holla is your answer. To do so, You should identify key features that should complete every need of your business and the customers.
1. Get To Know Your Target Audience
The target audience is the people for whom you are developing your project. It is a crucial factor that will determine your app’s success. Your app’s design, marketing strategies, and numerous other aspects will depend on the type of group you choose to target. Whether you want to target Gen X, Gen Z, Millennials, or you are going for all of them.
The project’s features and functionality carved with a particular group in mind will help you build a large audience. Suppose you are building this project for Millenials. If you add some similar features of the apps from their era with some added advancements, they will be attracted to your app.
However, if you are doing this project for Gen X or Gen Z audience, you have to add many cool features like filters, stickers, emoticons, etc. They love trying cool new features, and if your project has them, you are one step close to gaining a spot in the market.
In short, finding your target audience is the key to making your product successful.
2. Get To Know Your Competitors
After you have identified your target audience, your next step should be to identify your competitors. Get to know everything you can about them, including their strategies and how they work. Although getting to their core strategies could be difficult, you can always know what the audience wants by carrying out a survey. You’ll have a better idea about the things that your competitors are failing to provide to the audience, and you can work them out to your advantage.
3. Get Your Design Right
Now you know your target audience and your competitors. Your project should have an appealing UI and UX. While developing an app like Holla, you should make your user’s experience remarkable by making the UI flexible to use. Users should not waste time finding various features. Everything should be easily accessible.
Along with UI, it should have a flawlessly engineered mobile app design that should attract users.
By doing thorough market research, you can build your app’s design with a skillful app designer. These designs are the ones that will be responsible for your brand’s image.
4. The Development Process
The development of these kinds of projects requires good research and a lot of brainstorming. Let’s look at the development process and the technologies that are required:
a. The Algorithm
The main reason these random video chat applications are thriving is their unique algorithm. These apps use an algorithm with simplified logic to attract more users to assess incoming chats and calls.
Just after signing up, your screen will get random requests from others. You can choose to reject or accept them. You are just a swipe away from getting connected to a random stranger.
b. WebRTC
WebRTC is simply a platform that video chat developing companies use in order to integrate their software that enables fast, simple, and excellent quality video and audio calls. It will help you improve the customer’s experience of anonymous chat applications to increase revenues.
In simple terms, WebRTC is a very secure method of communicating that encrypts your every sensitive data before transmitting. The data security risks are higher among audio and video calls in these times, and every user wants their data safe and secure, and that’s where WebRTC comes into the picture.
The APIs of WebRTC that you can use in building your random video chat app:
- RTR Peer Connection: This enables you to activate video or audio data transfer with complete encryption support.
- OpenTok: This is a PaaS platform that is cloud-based and behaves as a wrapper library. Being an open-source technology makes it flexible to set up cross platforms for video chats.
- MediaStream: This enables the users of the application to chat using either a microphone or webcam.
WebRTC is not a single media server that is available in the market. There are others like Wowza and Red5 that are pretty expensive.
Also Read: How to Make an App Like Skype?
5. Prototype and Testing
Once you have calculated all the above points as per your budget and your idea of starting with an MVP, You can move towards the next step, i.e., start developing the prototypes.
In the beginning, it is advised to make a Low Fidelity Prototype (LFP). The reason being, it will help you get a good grasp on the cause-effect relationships between the buttons and pages. It is advised to achieve a quality standard, testing wireframes, and creating an advised map of changes.
This approach will help you visualize the estimated amount of resources needed and development costs on the plus side.
After completing this stage, move to the next stage, i.e., creating a black and white prototype. It is mandatory to make a user-friendly UX design for an app like Holla.
Completing all these stages will take you to the final stage. The final stage includes creating a High Fidelity Prototype (HFP). This prototype will be used for crowd testing and getting feedback from your targeted audience, and obviously, finding and fixing bugs.
How Much Will It Cost (Time And Money)?
The features and add-ons on your random video chat app will determine the timeline of completion and the number of funds needed in simple terms. The more features your app will have, the costly it will get, and the lesser the features, the lesser is the price. Various features will affect your costing and timeline-like:
- The platform you want it on to be Android, iOS, or both.
- Your collaboration with a video chat application development company or a contractor.
- The versions of OS and Android you want your app to support.
- Whether you are building it from scratch or with the help of APIs.
- The location of your development center.
While developing these apps, the one thing to remember is always prioritizing the important features before deciding on your budget. The average cost of making an app like Holla depends on your requirements. Get in touch with Matellio Experts to know more in detail.
Conclusion
In these advanced times, these applications are the future of making relationships and friends online. These applications are getting more trustworthy with their encryptions. If you develop an app like Holla, users generally don’t give good responses to the startups, but if your app has excellent features, these users will take it to the top. You will never know the outcome unless you start.
Disclaimer: Please note that the content of this blog including links, texts, images, and graphics is only meant for informational purposes. We do not intend to infringe any copyright policy or do not possess any third-party material. If you have issues related to any of our content or images, kindly drop your message at info@matellio.com
