Real-Time Chat

Real-time chat is a staple in our personal and professional lives.

Chat platforms — with their emphasis on seamless, real-time communication — provide efficient avenues for sharing information, collaborating on projects, and maintaining connections.

This glossary page explores real-time chat and explains how it works, its key features, common use cases, and more.

What Is Real-Time Chat?

Real-time chat enables people to exchange messages, images, files, and other content instantly over the internet. It is the foundation of modern messaging experiences — from everyday apps like WhatsApp and iMessage, to workplace tools like Slack, to in-game chat and customer support.

Unlike traditional messaging formats like email or SMS, live messaging uses low-latency protocols to deliver messages nearly instantaneously. This allows users to carry on fluid, engaging conversations inside apps and digital experiences.

How Does Real-Time Chat Work?

Live messaging platforms maintain an active connection between a user's device and the chat server, typically using WebSockets or similar protocols. This connection enables two-way communication: when a user sends a message, it travels through the server to its recipient(s) and displays instantly in the chat interface.

The core architecture of live messaging includes:

• Client app: The front-end interface where users compose, send, and read messages
• Persistent connection: Typically built with WebSockets to ensure low latency and fast message delivery
• Backend server: Manages message routing, delivery, storage, and user presence
• Datastore: Stores message history and user metadata for retrieval

Real-time chat platforms also handle essential capabilities like offline message handling, delivery receipts, typing indicators, message threading, and file attachments — all of which contribute to a seamless chat experience.

Key Features of Real-Time Chat Applications

Essential features include:

• In-app messaging: This is the core of chat platforms — the ability to send messages between users in near real time. These apps are likely to support multiple languages, fonts for those languages, and text stylizations like bold, italics, strikethrough, and underline.
• Multimedia support: Chat apps often include more than just text and may support video calling, voice calling, screen sharing, live streaming, and file storage and transfer.
• Notifications: Apps will alert users for events like receiving messages, file transfers, reacts, or friend requests. Notifications look different depending on both the event and the platform, like push notifications for mobile, taskbar notifications for desktops, or tab icon changes for web.
• Customizable and interactive user interface: Apps often allow users to customize their interface, rearranging the order of chats, labeling chats or threads, picking color schemes and default fonts, uploading emojis, setting chat icons, and more.
• Accessibility features: Some chat platforms may offer features for users with disabilities, such as colorblind mode, adjustable font sizes, keyboard navigation, screen readers, and text-to-speech.
• Platform-specific features: Different platforms may offer unique features, such as professional-focused chats integrating with project management and other business-oriented tools, social messaging apps offering photo sharing and editing, and gaming-based chat apps showing details about the game a user is playing or allowing friends to join them in-game. 

Key Use Cases

Real-time messaging has made its way into recreational and professional applications, like: 

• Workplace Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat
• Social & Messaging Apps: WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram
• Gaming: Multiplayer game chat, Discord, team coordination
• Customer Support: Live chat with agents, chatbot assistants
• Live Events & Streaming: Twitch, YouTube Live, webinar platforms
• Dating Apps: In-app messaging for matches
• Marketplaces: Buyer-seller chat in e-commerce and classifieds apps

Let's explore some of these use cases more in-depth:

Chatbots

Real-time communication has changed how people do business by enabling customer service teams to respond immediately to customers. Unlike traditional support channels, you can connect to AI chatbots instantly.

Integrating real-time chat with AI has taken customer service to the next level. LLM-powered chatbots can handle routine queries without human intervention and are available 24/7. This makes sure users can always find support, which is key to driving customer satisfaction.

Messaging Apps

Modern messaging apps like WhatsApp, Discord, and Slack have become mainstream because of real-time messaging. You can use these apps to send text messages, share files, and collaborate in group chats. They have also transformed business transactions, remote team collaboration, and other forms of professional and personal communication.

Livestreaming Services

Livestreaming apps offer instant messaging capabilities to encourage live interactions between livestreamers and their audiences. When using tools like Twitch, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live, users can interact with each other via the chat sections by commenting, reacting, sharing opinions, bantering, and asking questions.

Video Conferencing Tools

Video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams have chat rooms that let users talk simultaneously. With these rooms, users can discuss tasks and share ideas without interrupting the meeting.

Integrating Chat with Your App: Build vs. Buy

Teams building real-time chat face a key decision: build versus buy (i.e., develop it in-house or leverage third-party APIs). 

Building from scratch offers full control and customization, but requires significant time and engineering resources to implement and maintain complex features like message delivery, synchronization, security, and scaling.

Using a chat API allows teams to integrate battle-tested, scalable chat features into their apps quickly. Providers like Stream offer APIs and SDKs for web, iOS, Android, and cross-platform frameworks, with built-in moderation, compliance, and performance optimizations.

Technical Consideration

WebSockets and Protocols

WebSockets is a communication protocol that transmits data between the client and server over the Internet. This protocol forms the backbone of real-time applications as it allows persistent connections.

A WebSocket can be written in any server-side programming language. However, this is a complex process, and most developers prefer libraries like Socket.IO for more straightforward implementations.

Other Backend Technologies

The backend configuration is crucial for achieving real-time data synchronization, handling message storage or persistence, and managing user authentication.

Database solutions like MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB provide seamless data storage. Another handy option is the Firebase Realtime Database, especially when building a small application.

To scale these chat apps, teams often rely on caching solutions like Redis or Memcached and message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ. These tools manage message queues and enable seamless data delivery.

Deployment and Hosting

You should always host messaging chat apps in scalable cloud solutions like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. These platforms provide computing and storage resources that enable chat applications to scale dynamically depending on usage.

Real-Time Chat UX Best Practices

Building an interactive real-time messaging app requires more than just messaging functionality. Great design, performance, and interactive features go a long way toward improving the user experience.

Some best practices to keep in mind when building a similar application include:

Intuitive and User-Friendly Interface

Instant apps need a visually appealing and intuitive user interface to provide a great experience. Make sure the layout provides simple navigation and has zero clutter. Settings, messages, and contact sections should be easily navigable and accessible.

Other essential elements include responsive design and maintaining consistent color schemes and typography across mobile and web.

Interactive Features

Some of the best instant messaging app features include typing indicators, message delivery indicators, read receipts, animations, stickers, and emojis. These additions make the app feel more lively.

For some elements, you can stick with what works — blue or green checkmarks for read receipts or ellipses or text for typing indicators. For other elements, like emojis, stickers, and animations, your design team can get more creative and collect feedback to see what users like for animation speed, sticker art styles, and more.

Real-Time Performance

By definition, real-time apps need solid performance, especially as they scale. This guarantees that users can communicate without delays and that notifications arrive promptly.

During development, use technologies such as WebSockets, caching, and CDNs. WebSockets reduce latency, while caching helps with quick loading times. You can also implement features like offline access so users can check messages even when not connected to a network.

Security and Privacy

Finally, check that your app complies with privacy regulations.

Apps need a strong cybersecurity posture to prevent unauthorized access and safeguard digital privacy. This involves end-to-end encryption (E2EE), secure databases, and regular auditing.

Users should have control over their data and be able to: 

• Delete messages and accounts
• Hide personal information
• Block or mute contacts

Frequently Asked Questions