When customers discover Virgil Security’s End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) solution, they sometimes ask if we also offer a plug-and-play full chat solution. But the Virgil team is laser focused on providing the underlying security layers for your applications and taking the thought of security off your hands. We leave the app building to you - the developer and creator.
That’s why we’re excited to highlight AppFriends, a customer that has built a turnkey social layer around the Virgil encrypted communications SDK, making it easy to add both social chat and E2EE to your app in one fell swoop.
In addition to being a backend host, AppFriends provides an out-of-the-box social UX/UI that is tested and iterated based on users’ social behavior. They offer public & private chat, a social graph, and SDKs for iOS, Android, ReactNative, JavaScript, as well as a server API.
How Does AppFriends Work?
Message Delivery
On a technical level, AppFriends offers a suite of SDKs that efficiently delivers messages without wasting bandwidth or creating redundancy between multiple devices by using a timestamp-based message queue and by utilizing both https and socket push to send and deliver messages. Uptime of 99.9% is achieved by hosting AppFriends on AWS with redundant server backup and built-in error reporting.
Integration
Integrating the AppFriends SDK into a mobile application is easy. The basic integration takes less than 30 minutes for an experienced mobile developer.
Message Encryption
The AppFriends team needed to efficiently and reliably deliver messages, so they searched for an encryption service that met four requirements:
- Asymmetric encryption is necessary and only the recipient should have the key to decrypt the message;
- When a message is received, there must be a way to verify the origin of the message;
- In a group chat, a message must be encrypted in a way that everyone in the group can efficiently decrypt;
- Some customers would still want to be able to see the chat content, so encryption must be an optional feature which can be easily turned on/off. AppFriends should not have any dependency on third-party encryption service.
After a lot of searching, they recognized that Virgil Security’s end-to-end encryption was the best solution for their needs.
AppFriends makes it easy to add a social layer to your app while allowing your team focus on what your customers love you for - your product focus.
Sign up here: http://AppFriends.me
For further details on how AppFriends is using Virgil to secure their chat communications, check out this blog post on Medium.
If you’re just looking to implement Virgil’s end-to-encryption, we’re always happy to get you on board at https://VirgilSecurity.com.
