Self-Hosted iOS Team Chat App

Budget: £20 - £250

I’m building a private, business-grade chat application for iOS that my company can run entirely on our own server. The core purpose is fast, reliable internal team communication, so the user experience should feel as snappy as Slack or Microsoft Teams while remaining fully under our control.

Core feature set • Real-time 1-to-1 and group chats • File sharing of common formats (PDF, images, Office docs, etc.) • Integrated voice and video calls (WebRTC or a similarly efficient framework)

Security & hosting Transport-level encryption (TLS) is sufficient; no extra compliance layers are required. All services—messaging, media relay, and push notification gateway—must be able to run on-premise, ideally via Docker containers or a straightforward Linux install script, so we never rely on third-party SaaS.

iOS specifics • Written in Swift (SwiftUI or UIKit—your choice, just stay native) • Push notifications for new messages and call invites • Clean, well-documented Xcode project so our in-house devs can maintain it

Deliverables

1. Complete iOS app source code and a signed build we can sideload for testing
2. Backend code or containers, with installation and config instructions
3. Brief hand-off call or screen share to walk through server setup, build process, and any third-party libraries

Acceptance criteria • Messages, files, and calls succeed on a local Wi-Fi network and over cellular using our server’s public IP • End-to-end latency under 300 ms for text and under 800 ms for calls in our test environment • No external services contacted once the app is configured with our server URL

If you have already built something similar or can leverage open-source frameworks without licensing issues, tell me how you’d approach it and roughly how long each milestone would take.