Is Live Video Calling Worth It for Your App?

Apps like WhatsApp and Zoom allow anyone worldwide to have face-to-face conversations as if they were in the same room. But this functionality can benefit more than just communication-focused apps.

Enabling your users to initiate video calls without having to switch to external apps enhances their experience with each other. And it can strengthen network effects to make your app stickier to increase retention, too.

In this article, we'll help you decide whether to add live video calling to your app. We'll also explain how to incorporate it, the basic features you should include, and the common challenges you'll face when deploying it.

When Should Live Video Calling Be Added to an App?

Video calling is essential for apps that rely on direct communication between users. However, forcing it can unnecessarily complicate the interface and detract from the user experience.

Here are some criteria to help you determine if your app would benefit from real-time communication or if you're better off without it:

• User interaction: Are real-time user interactions central to your app? For example, dating app users need to be able to easily communicate face-to-face in order to build a true romantic connection. Whereas extra communication features in a single-player role playing game would be distracting at best and potentially detrimental at worst.

• User expectations: Does user interaction inside your app increase each person's utility? A simple to-do list app wouldn't require multimedia capabilities, for instance. However, the best project management apps require constant real-time collaboration between team members to help get projects completed on time and under budget.

• Costs: Building out video calling in-house can be an expensive undertaking. But that doesn't even include all of the additional ongoing costs and hours lost to maintaining code bases once they're shipped, either.

• Technical requirements: Can your internal app handle the stress of scaling workloads? You'll need to monitor your backend infrastructure continually to ensure it can handle the processing requirements to facilitate seamless calls regularly.

• Impact on user experience: Live calling should add value that reinforces product use. If it's not well executed, integrated, or essential to your user experience, it can quickly become a distraction for both them and your team to maintain.

Industries That Rely Heavily on Live Video Calling

Zoom and Hangouts have made video conferencing a natural part of every office worker's day-to-day schedule. However, there is a growing variety of industries where video calling is essential to user experience and can help you increase app engagement.

Here are a few that benefit the most:

• Education: Students and teachers need a secure, safe place to discuss lesson plans, get feedback on assignments, and deliver better educational experiences. Teachers need to be able to reach any child, regardless of their background or circumstances. Video calls allow for both group lecture settings and one-to-one tutoring. You can recreate dynamic, in-person teaching by supplementing calls with digital whiteboards, asynchronous chats between sessions, and pinned messages for important reminders.

• Health services: Telemedicine apps connect experienced healthcare providers directly with patients in need. These patients can ask sensitive questions from the comfort of their own homes, connecting them to the best healthcare providers regardless of location. And these telehealth sessions can be delivered while still maintaining HIPAA-compliant standards.

• Remote, off-site work: The success or failure of remote teams always comes back to frictionless communication between team members. Office workers around the globe often have to manage tight deadlines across multiple time zones. Off-site teams rely heavily on crisp, clear video calls regardless of whether they're sitting in another office halfway around the globe or meeting with important customers a town away on a spotty Internet connection.

• Dating: Video calls allow dating app users to quickly meet and greet potential matches, pick up on nonverbal cues during the initial courting process, and deepen the connection once they get to know each other. It's the single best way for them to quickly know whether it's time to keep looking or feel safe enough to eventually meet in person.

• Gaming: Digital games are inherently social, bringing people from all over the world together to complete missions or tag-team new challenges. Rich, immersive worlds and challenging gameplay might initially attract users. But it's the community of users interacting in real time through video and chat that develops the friendships and nemeses that will keep them coming back for years to come.

• Marketplaces: People buy from other people they know, like, and trust. That's easier said than done online when you're trying to buy or sell with people across cultures and off-hours. Video calls can help create that lasting first impression within seconds. Pairing videos in marketplaces with offline chat support means that the sales process doesn't hit any roadblocks and helps buyers avoid that creeping feeling of post-purchase remorse.

• Sports and Fitness: Video calls help instructors stream group classes or 1:1 training, with the added bonus of flexibility and convenience for at-home moms or traveling road warriors. They enable trainers to establish connections with their members and provide feedback on their form when they start to see someone struggling. Users can develop accountability with other members through these live, shared experiences.

• Delivery and On-Demand Services: The convenience of on-demand delivery is unmatched, but only when everything comes together exactly as planned. Unfortunately, incomplete addresses, hotel or apartment drop-offs, and missed timeframes are a fact of life. A simple video call at these exact moments can help deliverers complete tasks faster while still maintaining the trust of repeat purchasers.

How Do You Add Video Calling to Your App?

There are two ways to enable face-to-face communication inside your app. Your team can build this video call functionality in-house, or you can use APIs and SDKs to incorporate these features by leveraging pre-existing technologies.

Let's explore these two options in more detail.

Building In-House

While developers could build anything, the critical question is, "should they?"

At the end of the day, it often comes down to resource allocation. Your team's internal bandwidth is probably already stretched based on the higher priorities sitting in your product roadmap.

Here's a quick overview of the components involved if you're considering building it out internally.

Backend Infrastructure

First, you need to establish the server side of your app to support video calling. The backend will handle essential tasks like:

• User authentication

• Call setup and management

• Data transmission

You can also use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to get on-demand access to existing resources. These services eliminate the need for costly upfront investments in building and maintaining on-premise infrastructure. Some options include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Signaling Servers

A signaling server initiates peer-to-peer (P2P) connections and sends metadata between devices. It enables users to communicate in real-time with minimal latency compared to server-based communication methods.

Setting up a signaling server effectively removes the "middleman" between clients, allowing for much faster data communication between users.

Communication Protocols

Communication protocols define how data is transmitted between users. There are different types of protocols, like HTTP, WebSocket, gRPC. The most common protocol used to establish P2P connections for video calling is Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC).

WebRTC is an open-source protocol that enables voice and video streaming between browsers and devices. It uses signaling servers to manage connections for multiple devices.

Attempting to build an app with real-time communication without WebRTC is possible, but you'd then need to use a lot of additional frameworks. Plus, you risk dealing with potential issues like data loss and connection drops.

WebRTC works across web browsers and operating systems, including iOS and Android. It also uses JavaScript, APIs, and HTML, making implementation more straightforward for development teams.

User Interface (UI)

User interfaces can also either be built from scratch or incorporated using frameworks like React to build interactive UIs.

Building new features from the ground up gives you more control over the development process. But there's also a significant opportunity cost to evaluate. The time your development team spends building this functionality can distract them from the core competencies of your app and other potentially more high-priority items sitting in their backlog.

Using APIs and SDKs

Integrating pre-existing APIs and SDKs can help you add this same feature set in only a few days.

A video calling API provides two major benefits. The APIs will process requests and responses with your app, providing real-time communication for users without the need to build and maintain your own systems. And a video SDK can provide your engineering team with a streamlined toolkit to easily customize the application across:

• Custom roles and permissions
• Audio transcriptions
• End-to-end encryption
• Two-factor authentication
• AI text moderation

Ready-made APIs and SDKs allow you to implement in-app video calling in a fraction of the time of building internally because they're built on a global edge network with scalability in mind. That way, you can handle a high volume of users without compromising on quality or performance.

Incorporating APIs and SDKs not only reduces the internal cost of re-creating everything, but it also results in less ongoing maintenance as well as bringing this feature to market faster for users, too.

Three Essential Video Calling Features to Include

There are three types of features to include when building out video calling capabilities for the first time, including:

1. Calling Features

Calling features allow app users to instantly start and run live video sessions.

• Start and end calls: Allows users to initiate and end calls with other users.
• Active speaker: Visually highlight who's talking, switch up participant order, and even detect speakers who're muted.
• Call recording: Allow users record a video call so all participants can refer to it for future reference.
• Transcriptions: All video calls can be automatically turned into text that participants can refer to later, in a number of multiple languages.
• Noise cancellation: Gives users the option to mute their microphones to prevent background noise or echos from being heard by other participants.
• Speakerphone support: Allows users to use their device's speaker instead of their headphones during a video call.
• Adaptive resolution: Call quality can be adjusted for not just network or client conditions, but also for cost control at scale.

2. Participant Features

Participant features increase interaction and collaboration for everyone on the call.

• Support for multiple participants: Groups or team members can join a video call together to facilitate discussion.
• Live streaming: Users can live stream these calls to over 100,000 participants.
• Waiting rooms: Lets hosts keep participants in a virtual "waiting room" or lobby before letting them into a call, in addition to a backstage mode for presenters about to go live.
• Whiteboards: Collaborative whiteboards can turn one-sided lectures into group brainstorming sessions.
• Contact management: Allows users to organize and manage their contacts, in addition to enabling live chat for participants to swap messages throughout the call.
• Screen sharing: Users can share their screen — or segments of it — with other participants. This includes picture-in-picture elements so multiple people can work together to reference different material for the same discussion.
• Virtual backgrounds: Participants can add their own virtual backgrounds and apply visual filters to put their best foot forward.

3. Security and Compliance Features

Security and compliance features help keep all communication safe and secure.

• End-to-end encryption (E2EE): E2EE encrypts data transfers from one endpoint to answer, preventing third parties from snooping on conversations.
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Improves security by requiring users to verify their identity using another method, like an authenticator app or SMS, prior to joining a call.
• Password-protected rooms: Allows hosts to secure their room with a password to ensure only invited participants can join.
• Permissions: Hosts have full control over participants to remove people who might be disruptive, weren't authorized to be there in the first place, or even ban them outright.
• Creating safe calling experiences: Involves using moderation tools to monitor and protect users from spam, harm, and CSAM by implementing privacy controls to keep rooms safe.
• Compliance features: Involves complying with standards like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Data Privacy Framework (DPF), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) so that data is handled responsibly.

Common Challenges That Arise With Live Video Calling

Adding live video capabilities to your app isn't always easy. Here are some of the most common challenges to watch out for when implementing this functionality for the first time.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

Cross-platform compatibility is a constant challenge. Your app's calls need to work as easily for users in the field on iOS or Android as they would on an Ethernet-connected desktop's web browser.

Maintaining cross-compatibility is an ongoing development headache. But the true problem is the potential unreliability of your app, which might cause them to consider other alternatives. 

Scalability

Using WebRTC for video and audio calls is easier, cheaper, and more secure because it allows direct, distributed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication instead of relying on a single server.

However, the downside exposure is introduced at scale. The number of connections can rise exponentially based on the number of devices, so you'll need to factor in the protocols being used for scalability from the beginning. This is why video APIs use SFU architecture to scale.

Security

Security is a concern not only for what's being discussed live on each call but also for who has potential access to that same information. Dating app users might require privacy when discussing personal information, while telehealth professionals consulting on sensitive topics with patients have strict HIPAA compliance.

That's why the first line of defense comes by using a combination of E2EE, MFA, and Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) to secure VoIP calls and video streaming connections.

The second layer of privacy controls puts the power into the hands of hosts. These role-based controls allow hosts to set password protections for invited guests only or hold unexpected people in a waiting room prior to admitting them. They can also mute, remove, and block users from future calls as well.

What's Next?

Live video calls are the best way for your users to interact with each other, get a better experience inside your app, and deliver the community that will keep them returning.

The problem, however, comes back to the age-old.

Building call functionality in-house is possible, but can be expensive and distracting. Especially with the competing priorities already sitting in your engineering team's backlog. Add-on top the ongoing maintenance, improvement, and potential scaling challenges as well.

Your alternative is to use reliable APIs and SDKs that deliver similar features, but often in a fraction of the initial startup cost and time.