How Much Does It Cost to Build an App like WhatsApp?

An app like WhatsApp: With mobile messaging apps surpassing the traffic of social media, you can easily predict that mobile chat apps are the future of mobile and WhatsApp is leading the charts with 1000 Million daily active users all around the world!

It has captured a 34% market share of the chat app market.  The app allows users to make free apps to app voice calls, share text, image, audio, location & video and 70% of its total users are daily active users!  Let’s get cracking on how much does it cost to develop an app like WhatsApp!

Feature List of WhatsApp:

• Login/Register (Mobile number verification)
• Automatic sync of contacts from the phone book, search, group creation and chat, individual chat, mute group, Broadcast
• Emoticons, sharing of the image, video, location, contacts, audio, capture/record, audio note, sent/read tick in the group and individual contacts both, a thumbnail of the sent image or video, last seen
• Set wallpaper, search for text in a chat, block, clear conversation, email conversation, add a shortcut of contact
• Help, profile pic uploading, set status, network usage
• Privacy options: Last seen, Profile photo, Blocked list
• Pay for a friend (email link, pay), change number, delete my account, network usage, tell a friend
• Chat settings: Enter is sent (tap enter to go to a new line or to send a message), media auto-download, font size
• Backup conversation, delete/clear/archive all conversations
• Notifications(contact and group): Play conversation tones, set notification tone, set default contact/group ringtone, vibrate, pop-up notification, Notification light
• Group admin can assign multiple admins. In a group when a member starts typing that should be shown, in an individual chat when a user starts typing it should be shown
• Trimming of videos
• Voice calling (Only one to one & not in a group)

Some of the most critical functionalists of the app like WhatsApp are:

• Mute group: In the case of group chat, it is mostly loaded with a lot of incoming messages between friends in a group. WhatsApp allows you to mute the chat groups for a certain period of time!
• XMPP server connectivity: It maintains a sticky service that will make ping or call to the XMPP server on regular basis (some seconds) so that connectivity is not lost & the user gets all messages in real-time.
• Video trimming: By carefully identifying the frames by allowing the user to trim them and also compress them for faster delivery.
• Delivered & Seen status in chat: It manages “Delivered” status by getting XMPP receipt of message & for “Seen” status, we will send one message in the back end through XMPP and manage it.

Approximate Timeline for Development app like WhatsApp

Total time to develop a similar app like WhatsApp on both iOS & Android platforms including the web services and would be around 3 to 4 Months. For a detailed break up of time, you can download our Analysis of Famous App report.

Approx How Much Does It Cost to Make an App like WhatsApp?

The price to develop a similar app like WhatsApp on the iOS platform is approximate $26,400 (Twenty Six Thousand Four Hundred).

The price to develop a similar app like WhatsApp on the Android platform is approximate $26,400 (Twenty Six Thousand Four Hundred).

The price of CMS and web services to develop a similar app like WhatsApp is approximately $16,800 (Sixteen Thousand Eight Hundred).

The total price to develop a similar app like WhatsApp on both iOS & Android platforms including the web services and CMS is approximate $69,600 (Sixty Nine Thousand Six Hundred) and the total delivery time would be around 3 to 4 Months.

Limitation of Research

This research is part of our “Analysis of Famous App” research series the motive behind this series is to analyze the development cost and time frame particularly of popular apps is to serve potential app service seekers with accurate answers to their never-ending queries regarding app development. This information is the result of thorough research conducted by the skilled developers of OpenXcell Technolabs.

OpenXcell Technolabs has developed more than 500 apps to date. At OpenXcell we always follow the best practices of iOS & Android suggested by Apple & Google respectively. Hence, our years of experience have helped us to come up with this information that is solely based on our views, knowledge, and research process. The Price shared in the document does not include any optimization & maintenance cost which WhatsApp procured after launch. It is just an initial cost to develop a similar app like WhatsApp having the same functionalities.