Sendbird is a service for helping you add social features to your app. Wanna add in-app chat? Sendbird does that. Wanna add in-app voice or video calls? Sendbird does that.
Here’s how I always think about stuff like this. Whatever the thing you are building is, you should specialize in the core of it, and not get bogged down in building essentially another product as you’re doing it. Say you want to build an app for dentists to do bookings and customer management. Please do, by the way, my dentist could really use it. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you, the core of which is building a thing that is perfect for actual dentists and getting the UX right. In-app chat might be an important part of that, but you aren’t specifically building chat software, you’re building dentist software. Lean on Sendbird for the chat (and everything else).
To elaborate on the dentist software example for a bit, I can tell you more about my dentist. They are so eager to text me, email me, call me, even use social media, to remind me about everything constantly. But for me to communicate with them, I have to call. It’s the only way to talk to them about anything—and it’s obnoxious. If there was a dentist in town where I knew I could fire up a quick digital chat with them to book things, I’d literally switch dentists. Even better if I could click a button in a browser to call them or do a video consult. That’s just good business.
You know what else? Your new app for dentists (seriously, you should do this) is going to have to be compliant on a million standards for any dentist to buy it. This means any software you buy will need to be too. Good thing Sendbird is all set with HIPPA/HITECH, SOC 2, GDPR, and more, not to mention being hugely security-focused.
Sendbird aren’t spring chickens either, they are already trusted by Reddit, Virgin UAE, Yahoo, Meetup, and tons more.
Chat is tricky stuff, too. It’s not just a simple as shuffling a message off to another user and displaying it. Modern chat offers things like reactions, replies, and notifications. Chat needs to be friendly to poor networks and offline situations. Harder still, moderating chat activity and social control like blocking and reporting. Not only does Sendbird help with all that, their UIKit will help you build the interface as well.
Build it with Sendbird, and it’ll scale forever.
Sendbird’s client base gave us confidence that they would be able to handle our traffic and projected growth. ”
Ben Celibicic, CTO
Modern apps have modern users that expect these sort of features.
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