In 2025, the number of social media users will exceed 5.4 billion people. This is a huge market that presents multiple opportunities for financial growth and company development. To make a popular, easy-to-get-into social app, you have to avoid several social app creation mistakes.
According to cognitive science research, anything under 100 milliseconds is perceived by the human brain as instantaneous. If your app’s image refresh rate exceeds this number, users may perceive it as lag. This brings satisfaction down.
There are six complex mistakes that can break the success of your social app. By understanding those critical failures now, you can build a one-step-ahead social app.
Mistake 1: Ignoring User Experience
One of the main mistakes is neglecting user experience (UX). If users leave in the first two seconds because they don’t like your app’s UX, none of the clever backend features matter.
With social apps, users can grow increasingly impatient. Poor UX can directly correlate with high user abandonment. If the app takes effort to navigate, users can assume it’s impractical to use.
You should highlight the essential actions, such as chat, notifications, and feed. The design needs to be built around key user scenarios. UX is wasted if users leave because they can’t find the message button. Early usability testing with five or more users could solve this issue.
Mistake 2: Weak Security & Privacy
Weak social app security can damage your app’s reputation and expose you to significant fines. They handle private conversations that could become targets for hackers. The social app data is sensitive, personal, and financial in nature. High security standards should be implemented from day one.
Here are the data security threats that keep developers awake at night:
- Cross-site scripting.
- Buffer overflow attacks.
- Broken access control.
Those threats force developers to multiple levels of defense:
- Layer one — end-to-end encryption.
- Layer two — robust token-based and 2FA authentication.
- Layer three — strict access control, such as Role-Based Access Control.
- Layer four — continuous monitoring.
You should use encryption protocols, such as SST and TLS, to encrypt connections between the client and the servers.
Mistake 3: Poor Scalability Planning
Delivering one user message in your social app fast might not be a problem. However, when hundreds of thousands of users want to send several messages at the same time, the poor scalability planning might destroy your social app. You have to prepare your product for a massive, unpredictable demand beforehand.
Rolling out vertical scaling by buying a bigger server might solve the problem. More RAM and CPU might also help. However, those solutions are expensive. They created a single point of failure. If one server goes down, everything stops. The only cost-effective option is horizontal scaling.
Horizontal scaling in social apps is similar to opening more drive-through lanes on the highway. You can spread the load across many smaller servers. However, if user A is connected to server 1 and user B is on server 5, getting user A’s message to user B might present a new challenge. The solution is a publish-subscribe pattern.
Pub-sub pattern introduces a middleman. This central router decouples the message. User A doesn’t send a message directly to user B’s server. Instead, user A publishes their message to a specific channel on the message broker, such as a group chat.
The broker looks at all the app servers that have users subscribed to groups. Then, it pushes the message to all of them. It makes the system flexible and scalable.
Here are tactical infrastructure improvements you might need for your social app:
- Smart load balancers.
- Automated scaling.
- Cashing layers.
- Message queuing and routing systems.
Mistake 4: Neglecting Real-Time Performance
Speed is a modern expectation. In a chat, a two-second delay feels like the whole app is broken. Users have been spoiled by apps that feel instantaneous. If your app has a lag, they think your app is cheap.
The solution is using true real-time protocols such as WebSockets. Those protocols can maintain a persistent two-way connection. The server can push the data to the client the moment it arrives.
Real-time performance is one of those features that come unnoticed when done perfectly. However, it can become a pain point if ignored.
Mistake 5: Overcomplicating Features
Freelancers often make the mistake of overloading social apps with multiple features. They try to create a Swiss knife of an app. However, sometimes developers take it the other way by building a minimalistic app that feels bland.
Live video and stories from day one might not be the best idea if you want to develop a functional social app. It spreads the development resources, making them thin. More features don’t mean more value. They make the app heavy, slow, and costly to build.
The solution here is Minimum Viable Product (MVP). You should define the core MVP for your social app. You can launch it with:
- Registration.
- Basic messaging.
- Notifications.
- Feed.
Focus on building systems that can handle future expansion from the start.
Mistake 6: Forgetting Cross-Platform Needs
Modern users expect total seamlessness. They might chat on their Android phone during the commute. Then, they want to switch to a desktop web browser at work and maybe check something on their partner’s iPhone at home. Inconsistent design might cause poor retention.
The possible cause of forgetting about cross-platform needs is neglect of specific user interface (UI) guidelines or creating completely separate native code bases for each platform. It can become a maintenance nightmare. It can also create feature disparity.
Cross-platform app development can help you achieve consistency between various platforms. React Native or Flutter allows you to write your app’s code once and deploy it on iOS and Android. You can also use platform guidelines if you want to build native apps. UX should feel intuitive for their specific device.
Key Takeaways for Freelancers
The real test of a robust, world-class messaging system isn’t just how it performs. It’s about how it handles tasks when everything goes wrong.
You should prioritize simplicity and UX from the beginning. Then, you need scalability solutions and security layers for your social app. Take care of live-time performance and resist the feature cravings at the start. If you avoid those six mistakes above, you can ensure your social app is ready for the long game.
Keep the conversation going…
Over 10,000 of us are having daily conversations over in our free Facebook group and we’d love to see you there. Join us!
