If you are providing a sports application, live streaming platform, or niche marketplace, you are most likely managing a “leaky bucket” situation. Users come, consume your product, and then they disappear.
They aren’t leaving because the product is no good. They are leaving because they want to communicate, and there hasn’t been any in-app community where they can do that.
Therefore, they migrate. With no in-app community to have those conversations, they go to Discord, to Reddit, to WhatsApp to debate the latest twist in the plot or the refereeing decision. It’s a faux pa. You’re literally putting the hard-won outcome of your engagement, your user data, your community energy into the hands of a third-party service like a free gift.
The solution is clear: don’t outsource your community, but build one.
If you say the words “building a chat feature” to your CTO, they will likely turn bright shades of purple. In the world of software development, this is the same as saying “months of work,” high server costs, and a scaling headache.
The bright side is that technology has changed. You no longer have to start from ground zero, nor do you have to deal with massive SDKs that hold you back.
This is how you can incorporate a fully functional social component into your existing web application without having to redo code.
Technical headache: The fallibility of “Building it yourself”
It is worth examining the reasons why the manual method is actually a trap.
Adding a chat system to your project might seem like a no-brainer. But trust me, chat is a beast. You’re no longer dealing with rearranging text; you have things such as WebSocket infrastructure, read receipts, image upload, and most importantly, scalability. You need to scale from 0 to 50,000 users with a scored goal.
Unless you have a huge engineering team just sitting around with nothing to do, the ROI just isn’t there,
Even where it would have seemed that taking a “shortcut” and leveraging a “standard Chat SDK” is possible.
Using a conventional SDK, every time you want to patch a bug, change a button color, or add a new feature, you have to put out a new version of your app. And then you have to wait for Apple to approve it, wait a long, long time to see if it gets approved, and then wait an eternity to see if your users actually update their phones. It just suffocates a company like us with a two-week loop to add a feature to test over a weekend.
Another approach: Choosing webView
It is for these exact reasons that we developed Watchers on a WebView architecture. Some developers might raise an eyebrow at the mention of WebView, remembering what it was like ten years ago. The fact is that the state of browser engines (such as the ones used in Chrome and Safari WebKit browsers) is so advanced that it is rarely possible for the human eye to distinguish between the two.
But there is a reason: speed.
Since this approach effectively gives you a view inside your regular application, you can avoid the long update cycles of application stores altogether.
- Instant solutions: It becomes quite easy to identify a bug in the morning, and the solution to that bug could be ready by lunchtime.
- Server side updates: When we bring a new AI translation solution or a new engagement widget, it is immediately available in your app. This means you don’t have to deal with your code at all.
It enables you to integrate a fully functional social network in just days, not months.
What the integration actually looks like
Watchers stripped the process down to just the essentials so it doesn’t derail your roadmap. Here is the flow:
- Setup: You define the user journey. Where does the chat live? Is it a global lobby or an event-specific room?
- Embed: Your developers embed the Watchers component inside of your app layout.
- Single Sign-On (SSO): You set up a handshake between your user database and our layer. When a user clicks “Chat,” we know them instantly—avatar, username, even loyalty status included.
- Go live: Because the heavy lifting happens on our servers, you aren’t risking your core app’s stability.
The safety valve: Don’t forget moderation
There is one final piece to kill in-house chat projects, which is toxicity.
If a public space is opened without a plan, it will be filled with spam and abuse in a matter of minutes. Then if it is a poisonous chat, users will abandon it.
We fix these issues with built-in AI chat moderation, delivered as a five-layered system.
- AI context: We not only filter “naughty words.” Our AI technology considers the context of each posted message in milliseconds to prevent aggressiveness while allowing passionate sports discussions.
- Masking: The system automatically masks personal data like phone numbers, bank accounts or emails, to prevent scamming.
- User control: Your user base will have the ability to hide content they personally dislike.
The bottom line
It is time for you to stop “renting” your community on Discord.
When users are chatting on your platform, you own the data. You own the retention. You own the revenues. With a solution like watchers.io, you retain all of the benefits of having a huge platform without having to undergo the engineering hell of creating one.
It’s about retaining your users right where they should be: within the app they’re already enjoying.
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