5 Years of Technology Partnership Resulting in the Viber Messenger with 1B+ Users

Customer

The Customer is Viber, the startup that has created a cross-platform VoIP and instant messaging app of the same name that quickly gained popularity across the globe and now totals to over a billion registered users. In 2014, Viber was acquired by Rakuten, one of the largest Japanese ecommerce companies.

Challenge

At the start of their business, Viber didn’t have an in-house development center and chose outsourcing as a way of entering the market fast and cost-effectively. Once they had an iOS app launched, they needed an Android app to extend their audience, and a desktop app to strengthen their position among the registered users.

Cooperation

The cooperation with ScienceSoft began with PoC for the Android app. It was carried out by ScienceSoft’s senior developer and covered the basic app functionality – contacts, calls, and chats sections. Satisfied with the results, Viber went on with outsourcing the development of the Android app’s first version and the desktop app version to ScienceSoft.

The development was managed by the Customer directly and based on the Scrum methodology to allow the team to move in 1-3-week sprints and get prompt feedback from end users. To streamline development further, ScienceSoft’s team established the Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline in Jenkins.

Following the successful releases, Viber extended the cooperation with ScienceSoft to the evolution of their Android and desktop apps. Also, Viber decided to reinforce their core web development team with ScienceSoft’s backend developers. As a result, 3 ScienceSoft’s teams of around 10 developers in each worked in parallel on the key modules of the project:

• The Android team handled the development of new modules, such as the development of a push-to-talk feature.
• The desktop development team was engaged in the evolution of Viber for Windows/Mac/Linux.
• The web development team contributed to the back end of the Viber billing portal and the back end for in-app sticker purchases.

The collaboration process with the Customer included daily Scrum meetings and on-demand video calls to report on the work progress. ScienceSoft’s developers used Confluence as a knowledge base to keep all the project artifacts for the Customer’s easy access and Jira for task tracking to provide process transparency.

Results

The outsourcing engagement with ScienceSoft has lasted for 5+ years. The Customer obtained the Android app version of Viber and had it enriched with new features based on the end users’ feedback. Viber’s popularity was further increased with the continuously evolved desktop app. As a result, the Customer experienced the rapid customer base growth – 900 million users were registered in Viber by the end of our cooperation time.

Technologies and Tools

Project management: Confluence, Jira.

DevOps: Jenkins, GitLab.

Android development: Android SDK, Android Studio, Eclipse, ADT Plugin, jarsigner, SQLite, Volley, Gradle, Logcat, UiAutomator.

Desktop development: C++, Qt, WebRTC, Microsoft Visual Studio.

Web backend development: PHP, Zend Framework, MySQL.