How We Developed Fireaway, the Simplest Chat in the World

Although social networks continue rocking the world, instant messaging apps are also growing strong. Old leaders like Skype WhatsApp, WeChat or QQ Mobile (in China). The chat apps’ market remains very competitive, and developers worldwide are looking forward to adding distinct features to their chat products, either by improving their functionality or encryption. This leads to chat apps becoming more complicated, and thus heavyweight.

Imagine a situation where your phone bursts out from dozens of chat apps, and you can’t delete any of them. WhatsApp is for family, Slack is for work with a project team, Skype is for business partners from Australia, Viber is for business partners from Ukraine, Snapchat is for kids, and Facebook Messenger is for friends. Sometimes the combination of those apps might even make your phone work slower. Annoying, isn’t it?

That’s why we developed Fireaway – the simplest chat in the world. Fireaway is a single-use chat, where you can invite others with a link. As soon as you close the browser tab, the chat is gone!

The Product

The main idea behind Fireaway is to keep messaging as simple as possible. As chat apps become more complicated and content-rich, Fireaway goes the other way around. It's anonymous, registration free, and very lightweight. Fireaway is great for instant business and private communication.

In fact, the inspiration to create Fireaway came from the chat app Whereby, in which a user could create a chatroom and subsequently enter it without registration. As registration is a rather annoying process that requires adding phones and emails, we decided to get rid of it completely with our new product.

Anonymity is another part of Fireaway’s distinct features. It works particularly well for instant business communication when new acquaintances are not eager to immediately add you to the “family circle” of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Skype contacts. In this situation, you might create a Fireaway chat link to instantly connect with your business partner on urgent matters. In addition, such option works extremely well for people not very comfortable with frequent calling.

Finally, we proudly announce that Fireaway is a very lightweight app. You don’t need to worry that it will take up the precious gigabytes of your phone’s memory, as other apps do. We've designed Fireaway to be literally invisible!

How it works

Fireaway is available in both web and mobile versions. You don’t need to download it as an app to use the chat’s web version. Moreover, you can use Fireaway’s web version in a browser window on your mobile phone.

In order to start chatting, you simply need to open Fireaway, enter the chat’s name, for example, “Happy Tomato”, and you're ready to go! At first, the chat assigns a random icon and name to you (however, you can easily change your name by clicking “edit” next to it) and then you can invite other people to join the chat by giving them the chat link. 

A very important feature of Fireaway is that it resets the chat’s history once you close the browser tab. No chat history is saved! At the same time, you can visit the same chat link again any time you like. Once you have set up the link, it will always work.

Technologies

We've created Fireaway with the help of:

• Java Backend
• Twilio API
• React for Frontend

The major technical challenge was to create a chat app with the help of React Native. This was due to the fact that constant interface updates are difficult for cross-platform technologies. Eventually, we managed to adjust React application for a mobile device.

Team

• Project Manager
• 2 coders
• 2 designers

In total, it took us 3 weeks to complete the web version of the chat, and another 3 weeks to finish the mobile version.

Future plans

Currently, we have fully completed Fireaway’s development. We are looking forward to sharing our chat app with everyone and let it earn its own praise and followers in the diverse world of messaging tools. We expect Fireaway to become a useful app for those who value speed and privacy of communication.