Build A Social Audio App Like Yalla In A Week And Be As Successful

“Text is not enough, and video is too much; social audio is just right. ” Jeremiah Owyang, a tech-industry analyst and founding partner of Kaleido Insights, wrote in one of his articles. This statement reveals one of the key reasons behind the explosive growth of social audio.

“In the online social scenario, voice chatting is more appealing than video to young generations according to big data statistics of our real-time data network.”, commented a senior manager from ZEGOCLOUD.  ZEGOCLOUD provides video and voice sdk empowering social platforms such as Yalla. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, social audio platforms represented by Yalla also gained immense popularity.

Headquartered in Dubai, UAE, Yalla was founded in 2016 and went public on NYSE in 2020. Currently, Yalla has covered 50+ countries. It allows users to choose among thousands of live audio rooms hosted on the platform daily. According to the company’s 2021 third-quarter report, its revenues rose 110.8% year-over-year to US$71.3 million. 75.6% were generated from voice chat services and the rest from game services. Yalla’s average monthly active users (MAU) increased by 81.9% to 25.9 million in the third quarter of 2021. A leap upwards the 14.3 million in the third quarter of 2020.

Many other social audio platforms are taking Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and other regions by storm. Social audio platforms like Yalla have become the go-to spaces for the younger generations to hang out online. People can hold live discussions, meet people from around the world and make friends. Furthermore, they can play games, sing karaoke, send virtual gifts, and more.

So, why are the younger generations so into social audio platforms like Yalla? Let’s take a look at what Yalla has done right for its users:

• Group voice chats with no lags and no stutters

On Yalla, a voice chat room can have up to 8 speakers. They can turn on their mic to talk whenever they want, sing a song, or crack a joke to the audience. With reliable and smooth real-time audio communications, Yalla helps users from around the world build rapport quickly.

• Instant text messaging and emoji reactions

The audience can send instant text messages and emojis to comment, react, and cheer up the hosts or speakers.

• Virtual gifting

Members can send virtual gifts to hosts and speakers during a live session. Yalla provides various virtual gifts at various prices for users to purchase. When a gift is sent out, it will be highlighted in the room in an eye-catching way, like displaying a “bullet-screen” message or a super cool animation. That, in turn, encourages hosts and speakers to engage their audience more.

• Listening to music or playing games together

On Yalla, the hosts can stream music in the room or start a small game. Voice chat room can be a party place too.

To deliver an exceptional user experience, Yalla holds very high standards when selecting the technologies to build its platform. Upon careful testing and comparison, Yalla partnered with ZEGOCLOUD to build its voice chat rooms. ZEGOCLOUD is also the live audio room solution provider of StarMaker, a very successful live karaoke and music community with 50M+ users globally.

What made these platforms choose ZEGOCLOUD?

ZEGOCLOUD is a global cloud communications service provider of SDKs, APIs, and out-of-the-box vertical solutions. These help businesses and developers quickly build high-quality and reliable audio, video calls, and interactive live streaming into their apps and services. Currently, this vendor serves end-users in more than 200 countries and regions.

ZEGOCLOUD has released a new enhanced Live Audio Room solution regarding social audio. It helped developers build Yalla-like audio chat rooms in 5-7 days. The following are some of the core features this solution offers:

• Full-featured and streamlined SDK with business-oriented APIs

Based on its extensive experience supporting various live audio use cases, ZEGOCLOUD decided to take further steps to ease building live audio rooms.

ZEGOCLOUD provides a standalone live audio room SDK that combines the capabilities of both its real-time audio SDK and instant messaging SDK. In addition, this standalone SDK also provides business-oriented APIs. Developers can call directly to build various audio chat room features into their apps. These are room management, speaker seat management, text chat, virtual gifting, and more.

This more streamlined SDK integration and the business-oriented APIs will significantly reduce the development efforts and accellerate customers’ time-to-market.

• Enhanced permission control to prevent “Zoombombing” issues

“Zoombombing” (referring to the unwanted, disruptive intrusion into an audio/video call by uninvited users) doesn’t only happen in zoom calls; it also has been a significant concern for many audio and video social platforms. Without proper permission controls, users in an audio chat room may be able to take the mic and speak.

To address this, ZEGOCLOUD has developed a sophisticated Zoombombing prevention solution. Only users with permission to speak can publish audio streams through token-based authentication. Listeners’ permissions can only be limited to playing streams.

• Global network coverage with superior live audio quality

ZEGOCLOUD has deployed over 500 BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) nodes worldwide, covering end-users in more than 200 countries and regions. With an intelligent network scheduling system, ZEGOCLOUD’s live streaming end-to-end transmission latency can be as low as 79ms. ZEGOCLOUD has developed a sophisticated QoS strategy that combines adaptive jitter buffering, forward error correction, and frame loss compensation, allowing the platform to deliver a stable and smooth communication experience even under weak network conditions with 70% packet loss. With ZEGOCLOUD’s industry-leading audio pre-processing (acoustic echo cancellation, automatic noise suppression, and automatic gain control), users can have live audio conversations with superior audio quality.

• End-to-end data security and privacy compliance

Data security and user privacy protection are critical for any internet product. As a leading cloud communications service provider serving more than 4,000 businesses worldwide, ZEGOCLOUD complies with the highest international data security and service compliance standards. ZEGOCLOUD partners with KPMG, a global professional advisory firm with advanced knowledge and experience in global security and privacy compliance, to build a comprehensive system to protect data security and user privacy in every aspect of the organization.

To wrap it up, ZEGOCLOUD not only delivers a live audio room solution for social apps but also provides market-tested methods and practices that can help social platforms increase their user engagement level, boost their revenue and profitability, and enhance their core competencies.

Building a social audio platform? Give ZEGOCLOUD a try.

If you are also looking into building a social audio platform and want to achieve success as Yalla did, ZEGOCLOUD may be able to give you a helping hand.

By the way, ZEGOCLOUD gives you 10,000 minutes for free every month once you sign up.

Get started with 10,000 free minutes today!