I have been thinking about making my own chat service for my app but stuck in a build or buy situation.
Do startups usually build their own chat services into their apps?
If not, what chat services are there that most startups build into their apps?
Thanks.
I would say it depends.
If you know how to implement long polling then making a simple chat is not hard, the hardest part, being certainly the UI, but it can be improved over time. The only thing to remember is to sanitize and check all the input data, as a chat is basically moving untrusted data from user A to user B. A lot of in-house built chat systems are vulnerable to XSS and other injection attacks.
Otherwise, I've never used it, but I believe that a service such as https://pusher.com/ would make it.
I dunno though - even using something like Mattermost as the backend, you're probably still having to do a lot of UI work yourself as a wrapper around that. Damned if you do, damned if you don't?