How to Develop an Video Conferencing App Like Zoom Meeting?
Some brands that were never recognized by the masses have suddenly garnered recognition because of the COVID-19 crisis. There are some classes of applications that have seen a sudden spike in their usage and installation. The categories include grocery delivery apps, on-demand entertainment applications, telemedicine apps, and of course, communication apps.
On one side, apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram help people stay in touch with each other on the social front. However, on the professional/official front, the communication landscape has always been dominated by Citrix, Skype, and Google Meet.
Even in the space of professional meetings and video conferences for offices, Zoom was considered an underdog. In fact, there are not many possibilities that you have heard of the app Zoom if your meetings did not mandate the presence of more than six people at a time.
However, today, Zoom is a household name and it has been dubbed as the social network of the pandemic! It has transcended right from being an obscure platform for professional interaction right into the zone of becoming one of the most preferred and most common platforms for communication.
This is possibly one of the most unprecedented and most preferred success stories for any app company. Today, statistics bear an undeniable testimony to the greatness of Zoom. Zoom is more valuable than Uber and Lyft combined. The total number of downloads of the app has skyrocketed to 73,000,000 making the fresh installations of the app increase by a staggering 730% – an extremely formidable number when it comes to measuring any progress! To put this in a better perspective, Zoom had 100 million participants on meetings every year in 2015. However, in March 2020, the number of participants on Zoom meetings has grown to 200,000,000… Not in a year but in a single day!
Source: Statista
Zoom is a perfect example of how people prioritize things – at a juncture when meeting in person becomes less likely, people did not give any importance to the auxiliary aspects of life. TikTok, the app that was leading the download charts has aptly been pushed to second place because people did not have time for syncing their lips to famous dialogues or doing experimentally crazy things on video. It goes on to prove that some of the most basic applications still have their market intact.
This makes it the perfect time for aspiring entrepreneurs to develop an app like Zoom. Given the fact that most of the apps are perfected versions of a concept invented by someone else, it would make sense for anyone to create a business out of a Zoom clone app. With the availability of Zoom clone scripts, it might not be difficult to create a customized video conferencing and communication app like Zoom.
However, it should be understood that it is not just the app idea that made Zoom successful and popular. It is the product as a whole that offered a lot of features that were once deemed irrelevant. Today they have not only become relevant features but have even turned out to be silent marketing guns that were responsible for the unprecedented success of Zoom.
Any entrepreneur who plans to launch a conferencing app should know what to learn from a successful video conferencing app. Let us deep-dive into the features that made Zoom successful.
The diversity of services
Often, when we think about Zoom, we visualize an app with the flavor of monotony. However, there are different features and different services offered by Zoom catering to different levels of video conferencing.
Zoom meetings, for example, offers HD video conference services with messaging and content sharing options in real-time. It is perfectly fit for meetings, online classes, and video chats with a small group of friends. You can even incorporate features like calendar and scheduling.
The Zoom Video Webinar might not be the poster boy for the feature is that Zoom offers but it is one of the most admired platforms for event hosting and broadcasting. The app can host an interactive webinar with up to 100 participants and the number skyrockets to 10,000 participants if it is just view-only. There are different plants that determine the number of participants based on cost. The best part is you can monetize your webinar by integrating it with PayPal or Zapier. The app also brings in features like hand-raise, attention indicator and even taking polls over a question and answer session.
Zoom Conference Rooms is probably the biggest reason why isn't it was popular only in the corporate circles. It is a dedicated service for corporate environments because it brings in a lot of features that are completely ideal for such events. It is a combination of hardware and software. Users can share screen to multiple devices and show data and visuals while the meeting goes on. The features include HD WebCam, digital signage, whiteboarding sessions, and dedicated touch displays.
In addition to this, there is the Zoom phone which is nothing more than a phone but with enterprise-grade capabilities. It might not be globally available but the United States and Canada can boast of the privilege of getting its full-fledged versions.
Zoom chat can host anywhere between one-on-one chats or group discussions or group video calls up to a whopping 1000 members at a time. The app is available across all platforms on desktop and mobile, and the group video calls can be executed irrespective of the platform.
Zoom also brings a few trivial features that put it right at the top. With its focus on creating a unified platform for communication, Zen it has been made to be extremely scalable. It has not compromised on the quality of communication, keeping the audio and video in high definition. Zoom also gives a feature to record the meeting and also have a searchable transcript. You can also take notes as and when the meeting happens, and also share your screen if needed.
On the security front, Zoom has ensured that every conference, chat, and phone calls is encrypted. To make it cool, Zoom also gives features like virtual backgrounds and touching up the appearance which might not enhance the quality of the video conference but surely goes a long way in enhancing the experience with the app.
Given the above features and diversity and offerings, it is quite evident that Zoom was always ahead in its game and has dedicated its self to focusing on just one thing at a time.
The current market position
Most people might think that Zoom got the limelight only after the COVID-19 crisis. Contrary to popular belief, Zoom has always been in limelight at the right places. The August 2018 Gartner quadrant for meeting apps put Zoom among the visionary leaders and it was ranked along with Microsoft and Cisco, and well ahead of Google and Adobe. Zoom was recorded to have the highest “Voice of the customer” score and it was quite higher than Microsoft and Cisco.
Even in the stock market, Zoom has been a top performer. In 2019, Zoom what is the best IPO of the year. With gains of 130%, it is a top performer on NASDAQ as well.
Its revenue grew from $60 million in 2017 to $330 million in 2019. 2020, however, was growth at a different level for Zoom. The revenue of Zoom in the first quarter of 2020 alone was $188 million.
Creating an app like Zoom
Zoom is probably a redefiner when it comes to meetings. To put together an app like Zoom, you will need to have a lot of aspects like business analysis, project management, app development, back-end development and marketing figure it out.
While all the other aspects might be difficult, app development alone has an easy solution. You can consider using white label scripts of Zoom and all you need to do is customize the script according to your requirements. There are a lot of companies that offer the Zoom clone script and you can get in touch with them to get you started.
Conclusion
The fact that Google has increased the number of participants in their meeting app and the news that Facebook is embarking on creating a meeting app that is integrated with their messaging platform is a resounding testimony to the fact that an app like Zoom is more like a technology demonstrator that proves to the tech world that video conferencing and mass media meetings are a different domain in themselves and not just an auxiliary feature.
It also goes on to prove that video conferencing with multiple people is not just a corporate requirement but even common people require it, at least during times of global emergencies. The best time for an entrepreneur to create a new business is at a time when an old business idea has acquired a new flavor of urgency and relevance. Given the circumstances, now would be a perfect time for you to invest in creating an app like Zoom.
