WAYA

Overview

WAYA is the messaging and social app launched by Ghanaian dancehall star Shatta Wale as "the African way to connect". It brings one-to-one and group chats, voice notes, photos, videos, and documents, stories, a Discover feed with trending hashtags, and reliable voice and video calls into one free app. SmartQix designed, built, and operates WAYA end to end: the iOS and Android apps, the web client, the real-time backend, and the calling infrastructure. It launched on 13 August 2026 and reached number one among free iPhone apps in Ghana four days later.

The challenge

A messenger has to work on the first day for people who already have WhatsApp. That means messages that arrive instantly, calls that survive a switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data, media that uploads on a weak connection, and an onboarding that finds your friends without handing over your whole address book. It also had to carry a celebrity launch: a spike from zero to tens of thousands of sign-ups in hours, driven by a fan movement that expected stories, a feed, verified badges, and the app to simply not fall over.

What we built

We built WAYA in React Native for iOS and Android on a shared Laravel backend, with WebSocket connections keeping chats, presence, and delivery status live in real time. Chats support replies, reactions, edits, deletes, delivery and read status, pinned conversations, and view-once media. Calls run over WebRTC with automatic reconnection when networks change and native incoming-call alerts on the lock screen. Stories sit above the chat list, and a Discover tab adds a For You, Following, and Latest feed with photos, video, text posts, comments, reposts, trending hashtags, and creator suggestions, so the app is a place to hang out and not only to message. Friend discovery works by name, username, verified email, or privacy-preserving contact matching, with requests, mutual-contact hints, and verified badges for public figures. Privacy controls cover discovery, notification previews, muting, blocking, reporting, and in-app account deletion. Traffic is protected with TLS and calls with WebRTC encryption in transit. Every feature is free, with no subscription.