Why Using Chat SDKs is Getting More Popular among Enterprises

The question of whether enterprises should incorporate messenger apps into their software systems at all has been answered long ago: definitely yes. Now, the next question is whether to build it in-house or use a ready-made solution?

The rule of thumb is if it is not your core functionality, don’t bother. In other words, for enterprises working in industries other than communication building own chat solutions is not an effective way to use their resources. In most cases, using an SDK from a company that builds chat tools professionally is a better idea. Let’s see why.

Challenges of in-house chat development

If you do opt for in-house development, there are quite a lot of factors that you need to consider:

• Quality standards set by popular messengers. Messaging apps have been around for decades, and users have been growing with them. They are used to the quality and feature-richness of popular apps and will be reluctant to accept anything less. The easy conferencing in Skype or Zoom, the privacy of Slack, the extensive calling and content-sharing functions of WhatsApp — are you ready to compete with all of them? If you are implementing a messaging app for your enterprise, it has to have all the features that users expect from such an app.
• In-house resources that you are going to spend on development. Building a chat app from scratch is going to take 3 to 4 months (during which you will still have no working messaging app). Moreover, you will need to assign your developers to this project taking them off their primary work on creating and improving your core products. That’s time and costs, both in the direct aspect of resources needed to build a chat app and in the indirect one of delays in your primary product development due to the lack of human resources.
• Importance of not overlooking anything. In a chat app, there are no small things. You need to remember everything — push notifications, read receipts, multi-platform support (you are going to have a mobile version, aren’t you?), file upload, video streaming, and lots of other things. Once you put together the entire scope of features that need to be implemented, you will see that building a chat app quickly grows into a full-fledged project requiring multiple skills.
• Need to provide ongoing support and maintenance. When you have rolled out your very own messenger, you will need to establish a permanent support and maintenance team for it. Besides the eventual communication failures or software bugs, there are security threats that appear all the time and need a quick response. Thus, the communication software needs to be regularly updated to remain up to the current cybersecurity situation. Moreover, you will have to set up a platform for users to get support and assistance in using the messenger. Again, this means additional costs for you, and you will need to either take your engineers off their work or hire new personnel to form a support team.
• Poor option for time-critical situations. Remember, we said that it will take 3 to 4 months to build an app? During that time, you will either have no internal communication at all or be forced to use a third-party solution if time is critical. Will you really wait 4 months to enable quality communication for your enterprise?

Advantages of using an SDK for building a chat app

Now, let’s see how using an SDK by a professional communication app developer can help you deal with these challenges.

• SDKs allow building feature-rich apps. Development companies building communication products as their primary business make sure that their solutions offer all the features that users expect from an advanced messaging app. They follow their competitors closely and monitor the market trends to see what users want from messengers today. Naturally, they implement all the features and functions that users might need and make sure that these features and functions are included in their SDKs.
• The cost of using an SDK is more effective than assigning in-house resources. Of course, implementing a chat via an SDK requires certain setup and integration effort and, consequently, costs. However, such effort and costs are incomparable with what is required to build an app from scratch. Needless to say, deploying a chat app via an SDK will take significantly less time, as SDKs are built with all components and integrations in place, you only need to incorporate them into your in-house systems.
• SDKs include all the required functionality. Companies building communication tools and providing SDKs to implement them make sure that the feature set contains everything that is needed in a modern chat app. Moreover, they pay a lot of attention to the app security and compliance with the applicable regulations. Often, such compliance is a must-have, especially when you operate in such sensitive industries as healthcare or finance. When you use an SDK, you can be sure that all components and their communication channels are protected properly and that all third-party tools and platforms are certified.
• Support and maintenance are provided by SDK developers. With an SDK, you are getting support from the provider’s engineers as well as the product updates, both regular and special. The provider will issue the required updates and patches keeping your communication tool effective and secure, you will only need to install them.

To sum it up, we can say that choosing an SDK to build a chat app will save you time and money and, what’s especially important, spare you from a lot of headache on the long and winding road of building an app from scratch. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel — everything is there already. Moreover, if you are looking for a custom app, most SDKs allow broad customization opportunities for you to build an app in your own style and design.

We welcome you to browse QuickBlox SDK documentation to see the possibilities it offers. For more details, contact us to set up a professional consultation from QuickBlox engineers and get started with implementing your very own messaging app.