Introducing Zoom Apps
Published: 2022-06-21 16:01:12

Zoom Apps allow you to bring your web applications front and center within Zoom Meetings and Webinars. They integrate seamlessly with Zoom using a lightweight and framework agnostic JavaScript SDK that enables you to provide a unique experience to participants and hosts of your meetings. 

With a broad feature-set to customize the meeting experience, it's simple to build the next must-have meeting app using familiar tools and web technologies or bring over your existing killer app.

What's more? Getting started with Zoom Apps couldn't be quicker! Just create an app on our App Marketplace and spin up one of our sample applications to have the power of Zoom at your fingertips.

Throughout this three-part series, we'll take an in-depth look at what Zoom Apps are, how to configure an app on our App Marketplace and how you can get started running a Hello World Zoom App right now.

## How does it work?
Zoom Apps are web apps with added APIs and features from the Zoom desktop and mobile clients. Building Zoom Apps gives you the wide-ranging functionality of a web app and the ability to tailor the experience to match your app's best in-meeting and post-meeting UX. Zoom Apps can be installed directly from the Zoom client or [Zoom App Marketplace](https://marketplace.zoom.us) and will open your web app as a view embedded within the Zoom Client. 

Using granularly scoped OAuth mechanisms and a lightweight JavaScript SDK, we can bring opportunities for new use cases and enhanced meeting experiences.

## What can Zoom Apps do?

Your web app will display by default as a panel on the side of a meeting, but you can also change this view in various ways based on your app's context. We can expand or pop out this view, fill the entire meeting space, and dynamically customize the experience for each user using features like [Collaborate Mode](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/beta-docs/zoom-apps/guides/collaboration-mode) or our [Layers API](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/beta-docs/zoom-apps/guides/layers-api).

### Meeting Bots
Let your app interact with users and join the meeting as a helping hand with our new [Meeting Bot](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/zoom-apps/guides/sdk-media-streams) feature powered by Zoom Apps and the [Zoom Meeting SDK](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/sdk/native-sdks/introduction).

### Collaborate Mode

[Collaborate Mode](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/zoom-apps/guides/collaboration-mode) shares a collaborative app and offers a frictionless method for everyone to join in on our favorite collaborative team tools. 

### Immersive Mode

Our [Layers API](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/zoom-apps/guides/layers-api) enables a new immersive opportunity for apps using Zoom's powerful layering system.

### Manage Breakout Rooms

Split the meeting into smaller sessions to enable a customized collaboration and networking flow using our [Breakout Rooms API](https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/zoom-apps/guides/zoom-apps-for-breakout-rooms).

## Ready? Set. Zoom!

Now that we know what Zoom Apps are let's create our credentials for the app and test out one of the sample applications available to us.

In the next part of this series, we'll look at creating and configuring your application on the [Zoom Marketplace](https://marketplace.zoom.us).