Chat is one of the hardest things to build and maintain. It was about half the effort of my past job. But it was mostly scope creep. We did text, image, audio messages, files, then this would break based on different phone models, different OS.
Most of the work is really on the front end. How do you handle live messages coming in? Does it show fresh, making it jump to the bottom of the screen. UI for multiple images and files. Eventually we added a contractor to handle chat.
Most of the work is really on the front end. How do you handle live messages coming in? Does it show fresh, making it jump to the bottom of the screen. UI for multiple images and files. Eventually we added a contractor to handle chat.
I'd say buy.