In the last decade, the way of communicating with each other has been completely revolutionized with the advent of social media. People of all ages are spending a lot of time online, scrolling the news feed, uploading photos, sharing stories, chatting, and doing much more on social media platforms.
Some of the highly popular apps of this niche are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Not to mention other social media apps which are also interesting for the specific circle of users and can also motivate any person to develop something similar. Social media apps are getting so popular because these apps are giving freedom to users.
They can see whatever they want, connect with their idol, or chat with their friends and family. You can share your thoughts, dreams, achievements to the whole world.
Developing social media apps is one of the leading directions in the IT industry. The users on these apps wish to chat, share and do a lot of exciting things. If you also wish to develop a social media app then continue reading this article. We have written a complete guide of developing a social media app.
Types of Social App
Before delving into the guide of social media app development you must know what type of social media app you want to develop. You have to define your competitors, target audience, and offer better user functionality.
Social Networks
These are apps like Facebook or LinkedIn. Here the aim of the platform is to connect people without differentiating users. These can be built to connect users pursuing different goals. For e.g. LinkedIn is a professional platform for people and help them to find a job. Facebook offers plenty of thematic groups and almost 2 billion people to befriend with. People can send friend requests or connections to each other.
As the name indicates, these type of apps gives the users opportunity to share the content of many different types. They can share photos, videos, and live videos. These apps are gaining a lot of popularity in the industry. The most popular social network Facebook also lets its users share content.
But there are some other media sharing networks such as YouTube which focus only on sharing one content type, here videos. You can create a better intuitive social app design to meet customer expectations. Popular examples of media sharing networks are YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
These social platforms are highly helpful for the users as they can learn new things from the expert and have access to a lot of knowledge. Discussion forms allow the users to find answers for a particular question, or topic. On these platforms, you can ask a question, start a discussion, and get answers from knowledgeable experts. Popular examples of apps of this type are Reddit and Quora.
Content Sharing Networks
The content sharing networks or bookmarking apps let the users organize or save links to various web apps or online resources. Users can put links in multiple folders according to the topic. There can be other exciting features as well on these platforms. For instance, Pinterest lets the users upload images, and other users can download pictures they like.
Consumer Review Networks
As you can go through the name, these platforms let the users know and submit for different types of services, products, or companies.
These sites are helpful for users to know about a company or service existing reviews and ratings. For e.g. Clutch is a popular platform for sharing reviews of IT companies, while on Glassdoor people check the working culture of a company, on TripAdvisor, you can get a flight, hotels, and other travel reviews.
Blogging and Publishing Networks
Blogging is not that much easy as it sounds. Firstly, you must love writing and have excellent written skills. They need a platform where they can upload their blogs from all devices. It is not difficult to build your own platform for this. Popular apps are YourStory, Medium, WordPress, etc.
Currently, the market leaders are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. However, among these many other platforms have also gained popularity, so you don’t need to think the market has been saturated and there are no chances for a new app. Users are always open to new features.
Before knowing the cost of developing a social media app, you need to develop into the features you have to consider. Features can greatly impact the price of the development of any kind of app. The features must meet the expectation of the target audience and solve their problems. The features are also divided into two different categories: MVP and Advanced.
An MVP is a procedure in which initially the mobile app comes with essential features that are required to go live, and find out whether the user wants an updated and more sophisticated version of this app with additional features.
After getting the feedback from the users, you can decide what features you should add, what is not necessary, how to improve UI & UX, etc.
MVP Features to Include in your App
Login & SignUp
The users must be able to onboard your app in many different ways. Apart from adding the default options such as Email & Password, or, Phone no. or Password, you can also include the Forgot Password feature. Regarding technologies, the developers can use Facebook or Google SDK. You can also choose Amazon SES (sign-up via phone number) or Amazon SNS (SMS verification).
User Profile
The users should be able to create a profile on the portal depending upon the type of social media app. There would be options on the screen such as contacting other users and viewing their media files or posts.
Search
There would be a comfortable search bar for the users where they can search for their kith & kin, colleagues, etc. They can find people by tags, user names, location, etc. Elastic Search is preferred to use here.
News Feed
This will act as the core of the social media pp. All updates, content shared, and new information would be located here. It is possible to integrate this feature as Instagram or Facebook did. It can act as a home screen of the app.
Chat
How to create a social networking app and not to fail? By adding a convenient and user-friendly chat feature. The users should be able to exchange messages on the chat fastly. And apart from the text messages, they must able to send photos, videos, and many other types of files. It’s common to use socket.io to develop scalable chats.
Add Post
On social media apps, adding posts, content, or questions is the inevitable part. The users could upload the post and can also add photos or videos from the gallery or take photos with a smartphone camera.
Push Notifications
Push notifications are helpful in most mobile applications. The users will get updates whenever they receive a new message, someone liked or commented on their post, react to the post, and for many other instances. Mobile app developers prefer to use FCM for creating push notifications.
The time required for implementing these features
| Features | Back-end Development | iOS Development | Android Development |
| Signup or Login | 20 hours | 20 hours | 18 hours |
| Profile | 70 hours | 110 hours | 115 hours |
| Search | 35 hours | 40 hours | 40 hours |
| News Feed | 60 hours | 105 hours | 105 hours |
| Chat | 100 hours | 170 hours | 170 hours |
| Add Post | 12 hours | 130 hours | 130 hours |
| Push Notifications | 14 hours | 15 hours | 15 hours |
| Total Time | 312 hours | 590 hours | 593 hours |
Augmented Reality Filters
When Snapchat was launched it got a huge popularity and is highly appreciated by the users for providing AR filters such as dog’s ears to beauty masks. Such AR filters can attract a large number of audience to your app. For implementing AR filters in the social media app, the developers can use the ML Kit and ARCore.
Editing
The users always want to edit their image before finally uploading to the social media platform. Hence, it would be a great idea to implement photo filters on the app. They can implement filters of different shades, crop & rotate images, remove unnecessary projects, create a collage, and more. You can use FFmpeg for implementing the editing feature.
Location-based Content
The other exciting feature is to provide content as per the user’s location. The app will analyze the location of the user through the GPS and provide content posted by the other users of the same location.
Time for implementing advanced features
| Feature | Back-end development | iOS development | Android development |
| Filters | 4 hours | 80 hours | 80 hours |
| Editing | – | 60 hours | 60 hours |
| Location-based content | 10 hours | 10 hours | 12 hours |
| Total time | 14 hours | 150 hours | 150 hours |
Apart from these features, you have to consider two more important factors on the final price: Admin panel development and social app design.
Admin Panel
Admin Panel is the portal where you would be able to manage users and your complete app. You could block, edit, or delete users. You can’t manage a huge number of users manually. In fact, you can also certain metrics through the Admin Panel. To create an admin panel, the developers will require at least 140 hours.
Design:
The design of the social media app would also play a very important role. The users prefer to use an app that is highly captivating to them. Hence, you must create an attractive UI/UX design. Customers can’t spend much time to understand the working of the app. The designers will require to spend nearly 140 hours creating an attractive design.
Here is the list of team members that you will require for developing a social media app:
- Project Manager
- UI & UX Designer
- 1 or 2 iOS Developers
- 1 or 2 Android Developers
- Backend Developer
- QA Expert
| Tech Stack |
| iOS App | |
| Programming Language | Swift or Objective-C |
| Networking | Alamofire |
| Android App | |
| Programming Language | Kotlin |
| Networking | OkHttp 3 |
| Backend Development | |
| Programming Language | Node.js |
| Framework | Express 4 |
| Database | MySQL |
| Chat | Socket.io |
| Singup | Amazon SES, Amazon SNS |
| API | Swagger |
| Tools | |
| Push Notifications | FCM |
| Geolocation | Google Maps |
| Storage | Amazon S3 |
| Emails | Elastic Email |
| Search | Elastic Search |
| AR Filters | ML Kit, ARCore |
Wrapping Up
Social Media apps have always been trending. People can spend hours on these apps without getting tired. These apps are great in revenue but required highly exciting features to retain users. If you are also planning to develop a similar app, then you can definitely consult us. We, at Amplework, one of the best mobile application development companies in India, are having expertise in developing mobile apps as per your requirements.
