Zoom App Ideas & How to Create Your Own

Zoom Apps, from Zoom.

Last week, Zoom concluded its annual Zoomtopia event. One of the main topics of conversation: Zoom Apps.

What are Zoom Apps?

Zoom Apps are features that are directly embedded into your Zoom experience. They’re all about enhancing your video chat experience: you can use productivity apps for co-working, activities for breaking the ice, and games for connecting virtually with loved ones.

Ideas to Help You Create Your Own Zoom App

We’re busy building our next Zoom App, but along the way we’ve had some other fun ideas. Since we can’t get to all of them, we’re throwing out a few of our ideas to get you started! 🎉

1. An app to pull up a recipe mid-call. In a long distance relationship? Cooking together can be a fun virtual date. An app that pulls up the recipe on your Zoom call could be a great way to make it happen.
2. An app to connect your heart rate monitor to calls. Ever been to an Orangetheory class? Part of the appeal of those classes is the competition; you get to see how your effort stacks up to everyone else. Virtual fitness classes are great, but they might be missing that one uniting element.
3. A medical scribe/note taking app. Millions of people have opted for virtual doctor’s appointments instead of in-person visits since the start of the pandemic. How could an app make these virtual visits easier?
4. A Twitch-style chat for webinars. What if a gamer wants to start streaming their screen during a webinar? Why send users to another link when you could start streaming mid-Zoom?
5. Live engagement analytics for hosts. Zoom apps are just as much for hosts as they are for guests. An app that shows live engagement stats — such as number of members who sign off, members who swipe away from the screen, etc. — can help hosts adjust what they’re doing in real time.
6. Integration with Twitter showing live tweets. News channels, awards shows, and sports events do this all the time. Showing live tweets come in at the bottom of a Zoom screen could be a fun way to engage guests.

The ideas go on and on. When coming up with your own idea, try to think of how to improve the guest and/or host experience of a Zoom call. While some ideas may be great general app ideas, they may not be best suited for the Zoom marketplace.

How do I make my own Zoom app?

Building an app for Zoom is only available to exclusive launch partners right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start working on your own in the meantime. According to the CEO of Glimpse — one of the first fifty-five Zoom App launch partners — these are some helpful things to get you started:

• Solidify your purpose. What’s the need that you’re addressing with your app? Does a similar app already exist? Even if one does, there might be ways that you can give yours its own niche. The Zoom marketplace is a brand new landscape, and as a result, has tons of low-hanging fruit when it comes to app opportunities.
• Start creating mockups in Figma. With their prototyping tool, you can make life-like user experiences and get feedback before writing a line of code.
• Get coding. Zoom Apps are web apps that run in Zoom, with special access to client-side methods to affect the meeting experience. In other words, if you code in React you are all set.

Remember when Apple first created the App Store in 2008? At first, only a few companies could create apps. Now anyone can. If you start working on your own Zoom app now, you’ll be ahead of the game when the time comes to get your app out there.