The idea of “let’s build a chat feature” seems easy at first. However, a chat is more than just texting. It becomes an abyss of never-ending needs – typing notifications, read receipts, image hosting, WebSockets, servers to handle burst traffic, and the crucial part – — moderation.
For a startup, spending months developing the social aspect is money wasted on engineers. You are taking your team away from your value proposition to build something that already is provided for in the utilities that exist.
The traditional route was heavy on native SDKs, which come with their own set of headaches when it comes to maintenance. However, there is now a third route that you can take: WebView integrations.
This is how startups today overcome the build-versus-buy conundrum and integrate a fully managed in-app community into their applications in just days.
The Build Trap
The decision to build internally is not just about code writing; it is about embracing a never-ending cycle of maintenance.
- Infrastructure Chaos: You have to build a scalable infrastructure overnight. When your user base explodes during your product launch or event, your chat infrastructure needs to handle thousands of simultaneous connections constantly.
- The Safety Sinkhole: It’s one thing to add chat functionality, but it’s quite another to ensure it doesn’t devolve into a dumpster fire. You need to be able to handle a modern and well developed moderation system.
- Feature Creep: Today, users want more than just text. They want reactions, threads, and sharing of media, live streaming, giveaways, and many more. Developing these successfully creates a new product roadmap within your organization.
The SDK Trap
The classic quick route was to buy a Chat SDK. This was quicker than building it all by yourself, but SDKs are becoming a nuisance in the fast-paced world of agile development teams.
- Slow Iteration Cycle: With every bug fix or change in the UI, a new build has to be made, and then the app has to be submitted to the App Store, followed by a wait for its approval.
- Fragmented User Base: You experience “version ladder,” as users on older app versions cannot view new features or engage with users on newer app versions properly.
The Solution: The WebView Shortcut
The community layer will be an embeddable web component within your native application, if you use Watchers architecture.
The impact of this strategy is that the time taken for integration is reduced from months to days.
- Plug-and-Play Integration: This process has been simplified to the bare essentials. Your team just has to integrate the view into your application. This takes about one to two days, including customization. This isn’t an overhaul of your application, but rather opening an interface to your application.
- Updates on the Server Side: You can receive updates, patch bugs, or roll out a new widget on the server side, and it will be reflected in your app immediately.
- Batteries Included Features: When you use a solution like Watchers, you’re not merely getting a text box. You’re launching a full-featured and mature social environment that would take years to develop in-house:
- AI Moderation: There is a five-layer safety system that comes pre-installed, helping protect against toxicity and obscuring personal information at once.
- Translation: Your startup can be global from day one. Our AI translates messages automatically, allowing users who speak different languages to chat in the same room.
- Engagement Tools: You get access to gamification functionality, like badges for loyalty, even live streaming, without having to write complicated code.
Conclusion: Focus on Your Core Product
The role of a startup is to move fast and solve a particular problem for your users. Unless your product is a messenger, creating a chat is a distraction.
With the Watchers integration, you can treat community engagement as a microservice that you simply integrate, set up, and then let run. This way, you get to maintain the conversation, the data, and the users on your own platform without jeopardizing your engineering roadmap.