Sneak Peek into the Future of VoIP Apps
Author: Ameed Jamous
The Past
VoIP Clients have been around since the dial-up internet days, it was called PC2Phone where people connected their microphones to the PC in order to call someone aboard at a cheaper rate when telecom operators were charging $4.00/minute to make a call to China, since that time many companies have came into the industry with new concepts at that time like Vonage, Magic Jack (Device2Phone) models, unfortunately as VoIP technology and internet developed very quick some of these companies business models vanished due to technology changes and new convenient ways coming out.
Fast forward to the introduction of Apple’s App Store by Steve Jobs in 2008 developers immediately jumped onboard and started developing Peer2Peer OTT apps such as Viber, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat … which exploded around the world by offering 100% FREE messaging, voice, video communication services.
Many service providers realized that they need to have their own OTT apps in order to stop losing business against popular OTT apps, a handful of app software development companies stepped in to provide white-labeled OTT apps that none of them succeeded to a level of those Free popular apps, in my opinion it was due to lack of innovation and un-focused business models.
The SMS Explosion, Once again (OTP was born)
OTT (Over The Top) apps needed a way to verify customers phone numbers and make sure that your using a number that belongs to you and at the same time to be discoverable by others using the same phone number that you use on your phone, these app developers used the old SMS delivery method to send a One Time Pin code (OTP) to your number in order to verify and access the service, this is when the SMS business exploded once again and a whole new industry was born.
Software Development of VoIP Apps
Until very recently developing communication apps was not easy, it required very deep knowledge in both programming and SIP protocol and many other technologies on the backend to make one single app work properly, using so many libraries and techs to developer a single app often caused poor quality and experience for the end user and a nightmare for software developers, rapid development in Communication apps has never been easy due to this fact as well, however everything has changed already now with CPaaS SDKs, we’ll talk about this later in this blog post.
The Present
The growth of VoIP apps that offer free Voice, Text, Video calls continues and the standard has become very high for new developers to standout, almost every app out there has Free Voice, Chat , Video communication capability into it, more operators around the world are starting to accept the reality and unblocks these apps on their networks.
Charging money for voice, chat, video apps just simply doesn’t make sense to the users as long as they have apps that allows them to communicate without paying any money.
The good thing about the present is that CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) SDKs has allowed software developers to create communication apps very quickly and offer rich, high quality Video, Audio, Messaging experience with no prior knowledge in telecom or VoIP technology required, this opens up the opportunity to millions of developers around the world to access the world of telecom and use their creativity to develop amazing apps and business models.
The Future
In my opinion the future of communication apps (OTTs, VoIP Dialers) will look like this:
- Developers will move towards CPaaS SDKs to develop Video, Audio, Messaging web and mobile applications, Example OTT apps built with CPaaS SDKs.
- Developers will have to standout with quality and innovation, I see AR/MR (Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality) being a part of everyday’s communications by default, so if you haven’t jumped on augmented reality kits, you should !
- Profits will come from third party integrations with cloud business suites like SalesForce, Zendesk, FreshDesk etc.. , Ads such as audio Ads, overlayed Augment Reality objects (In video calls), Referrals to businesses and ride-sharing apps, peer2peer money transfers, subscriptions for other creative business models.
- Phone numbers will become totally virtual with users will be able to acquire and port phone numbers right from their smartphones, eSIM will replace the physical SIM card in no time.
I hope you found this article useful in helping you see the future from a different point view.