Top 5 Video Conferencing App in 2020 – How to build it?
Do you know, total weekly downloads for video conferencing apps were stable at 4.8 million in October 2019 but, rose to a whopping 52.1 million in April 2020?
Isn’t it amazing?
This blog has much more to astound you completely.
Let’s know more about the top Video Conferencing Apps and how they work.
Due to modernization, the modes of our communication are continuously evolving. Conversations aren’t confined exclusively to phone calls, messages, or E-mails anymore. In this era of digitalization, common people, and employees are much more inclined towards video conferencing applications, as it provides transmission of full-motion video images and high-quality audio at multiple areas within the same time.
Due to the global pandemic, there has been a sudden rise in the demand for virtual Work-from-home policies and social distancing due to government lockdowns. Consequently, video conferencing apps became the most important tools for organizations as well as for personal use in 2020.
According to Grandview Research, the global market for Online meeting app was worth $3.85 billion in 2019. By 2027, the global value of video conferencing will expand rapidly, at a rate of 9.9%. All this is due to the dependence of business and other organizations over these apps in order to communicate, conduct meetings and webinars, and continue with minimum work disruptions.
How Does Video Conferencing Apps Works?
We will make it super easy for you to understand the entire process in just 5 steps. Let’s go through them quickly:
Step 1: Establish Endpoints
Two or more users with proper peripheral devices like webcams, microphones, and screens. Applications, take audio and video input and provide you with processed outputs. Just make sure you are connected to a high-speed network to ensure data transfer.
Step 3: Setting up a meeting by Video Conferencing Apps
- Launch the Video Conferencing app on your device.
- After this, Sign In to the video conferencing app, in case you haven’t signed in yet.
- After this, you’ll be directed to a home screen, from where you can launch the New Meeting button. You can even disable the video while hosting the call.
- After you launch the meeting, you will be provided with details such as Meeting Topic, Host Name, Password, and Numeric Password for telephone and room systems, Invitation URL, and Participant ID, you have to share these details with your participants so that they can join the meeting.
- Once you’re done with your meeting, you can click the End Meeting button.
Step 3: Join the meeting on a Video Conferencing Apps
- Launch the Video Conferencing app on your mobile/laptop.
- Now, press the Join a Meeting dialogue box on the default screen.
- A pop-up screen appears which will ask you to enter the Meeting ID and password or the Personal Link, in order to join in a meeting.
- You can also change your name and add a profile picture from that app setting. Along with this you can enable or disable the options to connect to your mobile audio or your video.
- You can now join the meeting, by touching the Join button on the screen.
Top 5 Video Conferencing Apps In 2020
We have shortlisted the 5 best video conferencing apps for your ease:
Google Meet, which was popularly known as Google Hangouts Meet, is part of the Google Workspace known as G Suite. Google CEO recently announced that roughly 3 million people have joined the app every day and have seen a thirty-fold increase in usage since January. There are now over 100 million users, who use Meet daily. It is well developed to cater to professional meetings, it can handle a large number of users at the same time due to its smart participation. Along with this, it offers a fast interface which reduces the need to wait and ranked as the best Remote meeting apps.
One of the best features of the Google Meet video conferencing app is its deep integrations. It provides a feature to synchronize Google Calendar with many security options. Whenever you will schedule a meeting in your Google Calendar, the link will be automatically sent to your attendees and your attendees can instantly join the meeting with a single touch.
Whenever you’re in the middle of a call, you can easily find files and documents from Google Drive and other Apps. These documents can be easily shared in the chat box, without leaving your meeting. You can even start the meeting directly from your Gmail inbox.
Google Meet includes the feature of live captioning, which provides excellent accessibility to the users. These captions give the best results in English. Along with this, it has a tab-sharing feature that provides great assistance for media sharing. In order to provide much realistic video conferencing, it has enabled many layouts, where you can see 16 attendees at the same time on the same screen.
Whenever you are in a virtual meeting, interrupting someone is not considered a good option, just to avoid this Google Meet has enabled the “Raise Hand ”option. Due to this option, you can easily ask questions without disturbing the flow of conversation.
Google Meet is going to introduce a new feature this month, due to which you will be able to blur your background or replace it with an image. This will avoid all the distractions and will lead to a better focus of your teammates on you and on the topic of discussion, rather than your surroundings.
Google is about to launch a new feature, known as ‘polling’ to ensure quick and accurate decisions. This feature will ensure maximum participation of the attendees and will help in taking decisions by starting a real-time poll during a video call. In addition to this, you can also breakout rooms into small groups for any sort of discussions and strategies, and later reunite the main meeting. Virtual meets can be the best way to conduct meetings with your team.
Zoom is one of the most popular virtual meeting apps for organizations. It is feature-rich, with various affordable plans based on your usage and needs. On average Zoom had 300 million +downloads after April 2020.
It provides HD video and audio meetings to its users, which is very much similar to app like Google Meet. Along with this, it supports up to 1,000 participants at the same time, and up to 49 videos on a single screen, which is a huge number. The free version is limited but functional. The subscription packages offered by Zoom are very low when compared with the number of participants they allow inside the meeting. Some other dynamic features are phone call support, webinar and presentation features, screen share, safe driving mode, raising the hand, which are similar to App like Join.Me.
More importantly, even when your connectivity is not good, Zoom manages your network speed in such a way that you are not disconnected from the meeting, rather degrades the quality of the video. The host can easily record the entire meeting session and save it as a backup on his cloud. Participants can also use a chat box to carry out discussions with each other, either a bunch of people or a single individual. You can easily share your screen, choosing to either display the entire screen or just one of the apps you’re running.
Although security has always been a major concern for the Zoom video conferencing app, it is constantly working on improving its security strategies and implementing new features to its security settings. Zoom even lets you schedule meetings in advance by creating a room, chat anytime with any of your contacts, or connect to a room that has been created by the host. This is one of the reliable and stable options for video conferencing.
During a press conference, Microsoft revealed, Skype is used by 200 million people. During the global pandemic, the number of users has increased to 40 million, which is a 70% increase in month-over-month.
Skype video conferencing app, works exceptionally well for small meetings and conferences. It has been a very popular platform for teams to communicate since the beta was released in 2003. It has evolved with a “Meet Now” feature which allows free video-conferencing of up to 25 people with no time limits of call durations.
Skype meetings can be attended from its application and can also be used in the browser, you can easily schedule a Skype call and invite the attendees using their email address. It offers smart messaging features, through which you can interact effectively and can grab someone’s attention by tagging them in any post or chats. That is why it is considered as one of the best Video Chatting App and there is no other App Like Skype in the market.
It allows screen sharing and has a feature through which it can blur the background of the speaker’s end. To increase the concentration of the attendees and increase the productivity of the conversations. Other than this it comprises the ability to subtitle the conversations and record the chats and calls for up to 30 days.
Join.me is a paid platform for online meetings, owned by LogMeIn. It has many of the same features as Google meet and also considered as a Zoom clone. Instead, it shows the live participants in circular “bubbles”, rather than a rectangular video screen. Whenever you start screen sharing, the bubble automatically resizes and moves away from the screen, this enables you to view files and desktop screens.
Join.me video conferencing app allows unlimited audio conferencing tools via computer or phone, these calls comprises of mute/unmute buttons, active speaker, calls on toll-free numbers and local dial-in phone number options, and an audio conference waiting room to increase the accessibility of the host. Users can schedule their meetings on Google Calendar. Audio calls can be recorded, which can be directly saved to your cloud , which can be accessed and shared with users, this feature is similar to apps like Skype.
Pro and Business plan users are provided a Pass Presenter tool, which allows the host to decide whether to pass the screen sharing control to other participants or disable it. Thus, making it the best Video chat app Accompanied to this, the host can make annotations and highlight important points to the shared screen, by using a digital laser pointer.
Join. me offers a whiteboard feature that allows participants to share their ideas, jot down important points, illustrate the strategies, and create a virtual room in real-time, which is very much similar to office conference rooms. Join.me ensures high security (256-bit TLS encryption.), making it an ideal choice for companies in order to share sensitive information over audio calls and video conferencing.
JioMeet was launched on the evening of July 2, It offers secured and high-quality audio and video calls by supporting up to 100 participants. JioMeet is available for all the users, they can create their account by using their Email Id or phone no. The best feature of JioMeet is that there is no bounding time for meetings, users can host the meetings up to 24 hours also. Plus, there is no limit on the number of meetings to be hosted in a day.
Also, in the JioMeet video conferencing app, its user can now enlarge and pin a meeting participant by double-clicking the participant video screen. It has an interactive interface in which you can navigate inside the app with ease. It has many shortcuts to start a new meeting, join the meeting, mute and unmute your calls.
It allows the participants to share the screen, in order to ensure good focus and clarity between the calls. The host can enable the waiting room in video conferencing calls and can switch to other apps without dropping the calls, Similar to App like zoom. In addition to this, a safe driving mode is provided to alert the host and other participants that you are driving.
How To Develop Group Meeting App ?
Real-time Communication has become the “must-have” feature in most of the applications. Furthermore, with the pandemic stressing upon social distancing as the major safety precaution, the most convenient mode to stay in touch with your near and dear ones and colleagues in this pandemic is through video conferencing. It has been evolved to be the optimal solution for assisting and collaborating with your team remotely.
We have mentioned some key factors, which will help you to develop a high-quality video call app that will be appreciated by your customers:
STEP 1: Select a Platform
Initially, we need to select a platform, as it provides a clear roadmap of tools and the budget needed to develop the group meeting app.
Before you start building an app, ask yourself a question; Where do you want your application to run?
Smartphones?
Laptops/Desktops?
If you are still confused, WebRTC is the best option for you, here you don’t need to select a specific platform as it supports all the platforms you can offer.
STEP 2: Determine Your Key Features
Depending on your business needs, you can align and prioritize the features of your app to ensure maximum output. We have shortlisted the most common face-time features:
- User Registration
- Profile Management
- Pre-call video preview
- Chat Box
- Video and Audio Calls
- Multi-party Conference
- Screen sharing
- Encryption Of Data
- Recording Calls
STEP 3: Designing UI/UX
You must integrate the essential UX components within the approved concept of your application. User experience must remain visually appealing in order to ensure ease and a pleasurable experience for your users. UI/UX Design work should be attractive and unique.
STEP 4: Development Process
If you will choose WebRTC technology, which is widely used for developing real-time communication apps. They support a wide range of APIs to establish a peer-to-peer connection
- RTC Peer Connection: It allows audio and video communication and manages encryption and bandwidth effectively.
- RTC Data Channel: It establishes Peer-to-Peer communication with all data types.
- Media Stream: It assists the application to access the stream with the help of cameras and microphones.
STEP 5: Know Your Technology Stack
The technology stacks are required to develop an application, apart from the APIs mentioned above.
We have highlighted some of them below:
- iOS app development: Swift, iOS SDK
- Android app development: Java, Android SDK
- Frameworks: Angular, Laminas, Symfony, Laravel.
STEP 6: Testing Process
At this stage, the code is checked on various tools with human assistance, to eliminate all the bugs from the program. The final output is very much error-free and has a fair chance to become one of the toughest competitors of leading apps in the market.
What Is The Cost Of A Video Conferencing Application?
It is not easy to tell exactly, how much it will cost to develop a video conferencing app Due to the instability of market prices, the cost is highly dependent on the technology used; the team of the developers, total time invested to develop the application, and many other factors are very much dominant in deciding the cost of developing the apps.
The hiring models are different according to the needs of the business and cost also varies. For per hour charges, Developers at India are at most affordable rate of $25 Per Hour. The US, UK developers generally charge $80.
The second model is the outsourcing model and it gives you an MVP for a comprehensive cost. $40000-$80000 is the variation of MVP app. In this case, you get the app to launch for the user testing phase but it is not a fully functional app with all features. It gives you a cost for an app with minimum features.
For finally getting the app, you can get the fully functional app in $140,000-$192,000. A mobile app development company helps you in the deployment of the app also in this case.
Read Also: How to Develop an On-Demand Delivery App?
Bonus Tip: Build You App With Maven Cluster Due to the coronavirus outbreak, social distancing, working from home has become the new normal, which has escalated the demand for video conferencing apps, and hopefully, the demand might rise further. Developing a video conferencing app requires high technical knowledge with an analysis of technology and budget, due to which it is essential to hire dedicated mobile app developers in order to develop a fully-fledged application. If you are in search of some cost-effective and reliable options, it is highly advisable to consider Maven Cluster on your priority list. We (Maven Cluster), a leading Mobile App Development Company in India, have an excellent team of developers who have many years of experience and expertise in the Custom mobile app development industry by providing excellent Mobile App Development Services. Our team is highly committed to developing apps that add to your organization’s effectiveness in order to be a long-term asset.
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