A Detailed Guide to Developing a Voice Chat App Like Discord

In a bustling corridor of virtual communication (VoIP), be it for the gaming community or any marketing community, Discord stands tall as a beacon of connectivity. From chat support to enabling users to record and share their voice messages to chatting through typing while live streaming their acts, Discord offers modern-day features that today’s generation leaned on technology needs to maximize their reach and widen their network.

Did you know? In February 2023 only, Discord accounted for over 801 million monthly visits from global users. From those visits, the majority of users were from the age group 25-34 years only, and 22.2% from 16-24 years. Because of that and considering one of the factors, In Q4 2023, Discord booked revenue of $30.61 million from its mobile app only.

There was a time when Discord was only famous in the community of gamers. Nowadays, businesses are also finding opportunities through Discord and considering it as their reliable VoIP communication platform, like other platforms like Slack, Teams, etc. Not just businesses but many normal users who are fascinated by technologies and trying out new platforms often find Discord as a safe and reliable platform in comparison to others.

When opportunities are there, surely demand for such a VoIP platform would increase. Hence, if you’re looking to enter the market with a dominating VoIP platform, you must know everything, like how Discord dominated the market and things to consider to build a voice chat app like Discord.

What is A Discord App and How Does It Work?

Discord is a popular communication platform designed primarily for gamers that entered the market in 2015. Later on, seeing the increasing popularity, it expanded to include various communities beyond gaming. It allows users to create private servers where they can communicate via text, voice, and video chat.

Users can join servers dedicated to specific topics, interests, games, or communities. Discord offers features such as voice channels, text channels, direct messaging, and integration with other apps and services.

It has gained popularity for its ease of use, customizable features, and reliability, making it a preferred choice for online communities and collaboration among friends, gamers, professionals, and hobbyists alike.

If we check on popular Discord servers, then Midjourney tops the list with over 17.5 million community members. Midjourney is an AI-powered text-to-image generation tool that users can access through a Discord bot integrated into the official Discord server program.

Apart from that, many users have also found Discord for their cross-platform engagements, such as sharing content from other social media, such as affiliated servers for Reddit as well as TikTok. When the last survey was conducted in January 2023, TikTok servers like TikTok videos and TikTok zone were amongst the popular music servers on Discord with respective 684K and 565K registered accounts.

Why Creating A Voice Chat (VoIP) App like Discord Would Benefit Your Business?

Communication is the key, especially in the business landscape to work in collaboration effectively and efficiently. Well, it is more than just a trend that businesses need to stand out from the market while catering to what modern users need. If you are planning to enter the market as an on-demand app development company, it’s a must for you to know the market landscape of voice chat apps, especially the ones falling into the category of Discord.

As you know, Discord is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platform. It meets the demands of users for efficient, easy-to-access communication tools without any cross-country borders. When talking about VoIP and chat apps, WhatsApp always comes as one of such apps, like Discord and Telegram, which have exceeded their capabilities than being chat apps for all kinds of digital interactions.

As per Future Market Insights, the VOIP services market is expected to reach $354.7 billion by 2032 at a CAGR of 10.2%, covering the stack of 7% of the global telecommunications services market.

Overall, if your business plans to create a voice chat app like Discord, you may get an advantage to reap several benefits. You can create a platform like Discord that enhances user engagement, drives revenue, strengthens brand loyalty, and helps your business stay relevant and competitive in the rapidly evolving digital communication landscape.

What Features Should Your App Like Discord Have?

What do you think; how many VoIP platforms are available in the market? Tons of! Why do gamers choose to go with Discord, or why do other lovers of Discord? Because it offers power-packed features in an app that no other app could think of.

Hence, if you want to rule the chat app market like Discord does, your app should also consist of powerful features that can make your app compelling to users. Some of the popular Discord app-like features include:

Servers and Channels

One of the key features that makes Discord convincing to users is its server. In Discord, servers are more like private chat windows that users can join using any link or referrals if certain specifications are added. In this server, admins can also create different channels to communicate different purposes and have specific discussions.

This structure offers easy message organization and management, especially for large communities with multiple channels/subgroups. The specification is what defines the servers and channels feature of Discord compelling users to build an active and dedicated community.

Cross-Device App Data Synchronization

This is the most important feature to have in any online communication tool to easily go through previous chats to recall certain things and easily access the app with up-to-date data regardless of the device you use and the location you access from. All it requires is centered synchronized data that offers better portability.

All these can be achieved through cloud enablement. Cloud capabilities enable your app to take chat backups in real-time as well as at certain intervals if set. This way users can rely more on your chat application and find it convenient.

Advanced Chat Support

When it comes to chat, Discord goes beyond traditional text messaging. It offers a combo of text, voice, and video communication, all together with a screen sharing feature. This not only enables them to stream their game areas or watch movies by creating a remote movie watch party but also have chit-chat in various forms to get the experience like though divided by distance they are enjoying their fun activity together while connecting virtually. 

Having a combo of all in one platform, especially in yours, can create a rampage in this internet era. 

Customization

From customizing Discord’s own appearance for you to your profile, it has mind-blowing customization options that would have a havoc of WOW effect in your mind. Not just that, it also offers customization in notifications you receive from Discord. Now, what else do you want from any chat application? 

Customizations and personalizations are today’s buzzwords that every user needs in some way. From crafting messages for you only to curating suggestions for you to buy, we still want to have more and more. And if being a chat app like Discord, having this feature, for chat windows to each and every server or channel, would give your users a feeling of a special kind of experience. This feature will also help in increasing user loyalty and marketing efforts.

Screen Sharing and Collaboration Tools

Be it screen sharing to stream your game and showcase your moves to your fellow community members, watch entertaining movies with your close ones, or share your presentation with your community, Discord has all the compelling collaboration tools that all categories of users need. You can also implement these tools in your VoIP app to impress users, increase their use cases with your app and become your dedicated app users.

Bots

Not every user can be available for their community 24/7 dedicatedly unless you have an entire team working dedicatedly for you and your community in different time zones. Well, to offer your community members quick help, you need a proactive assistant to fill your absence and not disappoint users. Not just that, users may need assistance in doing something functionally.

Thinking about that cause, Discord offers users the flexibility to integrate bots for their specific purposes and offer dedicated services to their community. Speaking of which, Medalbot is one of the popular Discord bots that assists users in recording their live gaming footage.

How to Develop a Voice Chat App like Discord?

Creating an app like Discord is a critical process, which asks for many things to keep in mind and many procedures to follow. Speaking of which, the following processes play a key role in the mobile app development:

Market Research and Idea Validation

You have the best app idea to create an app like Discord. That’s great! But you have to understand its market size and how users are taking this app. As you now know the market size of VoIP platforms, it makes it clear to you to proceed with the further app development stages.

Define Core Features

With market research and idea validation, you come across tons of features to add to your online chat application like Discord. However, it must figure out top-rating features that make your app stand out and compelling for users to adopt your app. For both the first and second stages of the mobile app development, our team of business analysts will assist you thoroughly.

Design & Development

After gathering all the essentials to create an app like Discord, it’s time to do design research and put on design thinking and strategy. During the design stage, you’ll work closely with our designers, business analysts, and a project manager to craft the app UI/UX design that fits well into your expectation bar.

During the app design stage, we also involve developers to give their inputs on what’s possible technically to implement and whatnot to create a logical design. Based on your requirements for the app’s performance and other factors, our developers will help you select the right fit technology stack that energizes us to deliver the product that meets your expectations with all necessary integrations.

As far as the technology stack is concerned, for an app like Discord, our experts suggest using the following technology stack:

Programming Languages	Java/Kotlin for Android app, Swift for iOS, Flutter/ReactNative for cross-platform app development
Backend	Node.js, Express.js, WebSocket, MongoDB (NoSQL)/Firebase Realtime Database for real-time data synchronization
Cloud Services	AWS/GCP, Firebase
Integrations	Gaming tools integrations; Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and Mixer streaming services; Music Bots like Groovy, Rythm, or FredBoat; Productivity Tools like Trello, Asana, GitHub; Notification Services like PPagerDuty, Zapier, and IFTTT; Voce Assistants; Social Media Platforms; etc.

Testing & Quality Assurance

Here, app testing should be done in two ways, one from the technical QA engineers end and the other from the users’ end, to better understand where the app is lagging. By identifying the app’s loopholes, you can work on fixing them and make your app robust and ready to be delivered in the market.

Read more: Important Test Cases for Mobile Apps

Launch an App

After all assurance about the app build quality and performance chart, we’ll go ahead with launching your app like Discord to the respective platforms, to the Google Play Store for Android app, and Apple App Store for an iOS build.

With app launch assistance, we do offer App Store Optimization services to make your app stand out from the crowd of similar kinds of apps. 

Lastly, we ensure that your app stays relevant to the changing technological landscape by offering dedicated app support and maintenance services.

Read more: Why is Mobile App Maintenance Important?

How Much Does it Cost to Build a Voice Chat App like Discord?

Deciding on a cost to build an app like Discord is not that simple, it’s more like a dependency-intensive process, which can be affected by the complexity of app features, platform support (native or cross-platform), design requirements, location and expertise of the talents you onboard on your team, and more.

Here’s an in-depth breakdown of potential cost factors:

Development Team:

Hiring developers, designers, QA engineers, and a dedicated project manager will significantly impact the app development cost. Rates may vary as per their expertise and location. For example, if you hire talent from North America or Western Europe, it would cost you more compared to hiring talent from Asian countries like India.

Features and Functionalities:

The more features and functionalities in your app, the better user experience you can deliver. Each addition to the app feature and functionality will induce more cost inclusion. Simple feature implementation may cost less. But if you’re planning to harness AI-powered capabilities, they may cost more and even ask for more time for the app development.

Design:

App UI/UX design may seem like a less effort-intensive task, but it isn’t. It asks for detailed market and user research, a clear understanding of design principles, UX terms, and color theory, and a thorough UX audit to get a high-quality app design. For such, you also need to hire experienced UI/UX designers who meet your specific criteria incurring cost increment.

Platforms:

If planning to go for mobile app development, you may first need to decide whether you want to develop a native app or cross-platform one. If native (iOS and Android), then of course it would cost more as you need both expertise on board. If cross-platform app development, then you can save time and money, as it asks to write code one and run it on any device regardless of the operating system. But will cross-platform apps be as efficient and reliable as Native builds? Read our Native vs. Cross-Platform App Development – Pros & Cons – blog for better understanding.

Testing and Quality Assurance:

It’s a must to have confidence in your app like Discord before making it live for public use. And that can be achieved through thorough app testing and quality assurance approaches. In this, you go for multiple types of testing, functional and non-functional. You can even choose between manual QA or automation QA testing approaches. The cost would vary based on the choice you make.

Maintenance and Update:

Now, things get interesting. This plan is optional for you whether you want to opt for this with the company that has created your app or choose another firm. Anyway, this is the most important service that helps you keep your app relevant and performant for users. Looking at the bright side, experts always suggest choosing app support and maintenance services from a company that knows how your app code navigates.

Likewise, it’s challenging to provide an exact figure without detailed specifications. However, building a feature-rich app like Discord could cost thousands of dollars. That’s where it becomes essential to work closely with the development team to define project scope, prioritize features, and cost estimation that aligns with your business goals.

How MultiQoS Can Help You in Your Voice Chat App Like Discord Development?

Mobile apps nowadays have become an inseparable part of our lives. If apps offer the utmost conveniences to connect with users residing in different locations across the world with top-notch security and privacy that Discord offers with many compelling features and functionalities, then why don’t users want to use such? Well, Discord has definitely created a great reputation in the market, more like a dominating one when it comes to gamers’ favorite collaboration platform, but there’s no limit to creativity.

Who knows, do you have a great voice chat app idea that none of the giants in the domain have thought of, or do you want to become a convenient technology partner who is looking for an alternative to VoIP like Discord? That’s where MultiQoS comes in your assistance and helps you make your app the next competitor of Discord. From conceptualization, brainstorming, market and user research, and app planning to mobile app development, and even after that, we are at your service to reach the milestones you want to achieve in the technology-driven market.