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Ionic Video Chat

My commercial Ionic starter sold on the Ionic Market: a WhatsApp/Viber-style video and group text chat app using WebRTC (cordova-plugin-iosrtc), a socket.io signaling server and a Node/MongoDB backend for users and chat history, in Ionic 1 and Ionic 2/3 versions with a marketing site at ionicvideochat.com.

BPM
197
GRADE
B
LEVEL
9
RELEASES
11
YEARS
2017–2022

A WhatsApp Clone In A Weekend

January 19th, 2017. I wanted to see if I could build WhatsApp in a weekend. Video calling and text chat in an Ionic app, WebRTC for peer to peer video using cordova-plugin-iosrtc, a socket.io signaling server, and Node and MongoDB behind it for users and message history. Four days later, on the 23rd, v1.0.0 was out.

Then it kept going. On the 25th I started the Ionic 2 version, because Ionic had moved to Angular 2 and TypeScript and the old code wasn't coming along. On the 30th the server split out into its own project. All through February I was cutting releases for v1 and v2 side by side.

I put it on the Ionic Market as a paid starter: contact list, video previews while calling and answering, chat sounds, native audio with an HTML5 fallback, CSS animations, and a promise of frequent updates and support. Ionic 2 was only months old and the iOS WebRTC plugin was the only way to get video into a WKWebView, so most of the hard work was in a layer buyers never saw. It was the first time I had customers for something I'd made by myself.

The Release That Was A Website

On November 2nd, 2017 I cut v3.0.0 of Ionic Video Chat, the last release, and the same day started ionic-video-chat-web, a marketing site at ionicvideochat.com. That's where I'd been sending customers for docs and support since January.

Version one was a weekend attempt at building WhatsApp, tagged four days after I started. In February I ran two versions side by side, Ionic 1 and Ionic 2, releasing together. Then it got quiet: v2.2.1 in June, then nothing for four and a half months. After the first month, selling a starter kit on the Ionic Market was mostly support and documentation, and by fall what it needed most was a place to send people.

It ran ten months. Ionic moved on, WebRTC in an iOS WebView stopped being so hard, and the market for paid starters dried up. It was the first product since FriendBot that I built, sold and supported entirely by myself, and I learned a lot about what supporting one takes.

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