Stream is excited to announce a new major version of our iOS Chat SDK. This release comes packed with performance improvements that will enhance the overall developer experience by providing more flexibility and control over customizations when incorporating chat and messaging functionalities into mobile applications.
Specifically, this update will provide a more seamless SDK experience in the following areas:
- Developer Experience
- Consistency
- Customizability
Before we map out all of the details of this upgraded SDK, here are some key resources to get started:
Developer Experience
At the heart of this release is enhancing the developer experience. We completely overhauled our documentation by editing, reorganizing, and rewriting our iOS Chat SDK docs line by line to make implementing an in-app chat functionality as seamless as possible for both new and experienced developers.
We also launched a new iOS Chat SDK tutorial to accompany the documentation on our iOS Chat SDK page on our website. These resources have been updated to make the onboarding experience easy to navigate for this SDK.
Consistency
We paid more attention to the behavior and feel of our SDK by adding under-the-hood performance improvements to increase ease of use.
Developers who upgrade to this new version will notice faster animations and UI components along with improved listviews, scrolling behavior, and push notifications.
You can check out all of these enhancements yourself by installing our sample chat app on your iOS device. The sample app demonstrates just one possible implementation of Stream Chat using the new iOS SDK.
For your own integration, you can borrow the code from the sample app and start there, or you can customize our components and experiment with different channel types to match your use case.
But don’t just take our word for it! Download the sample app now and try it for yourself. It looks even better on 120hz 😉.
Customizability
Last but not least, we enhanced customizability in this release by adding support for theming and localization while also improving the customizable UI components and interchangeable message attachments.
Developers can add Stream’s pre-built components to their applications or customize the UI components library so that it suits their brand, voice, or use case. This additional level of customization enables developers to drastically reduce the time to add and maintain real-time chat in their applications.
As part of our SDK, developers and companies who prefer a bespoke design can also use Stream’s low-level Swift clients to bring their apps to life without inheriting from our pre-built components.
How to Migrate to v4 Now
The latest version of Stream’s iOS Chat SDK is a packed release with plenty of performance improvements all around. If you’re interested in migrating from a previous version or would like to see a complete list of changes, check out the iOS Migration guide.
As an open-source project, we encourage community feedback. If you find bugs you’d like to bring to our attention or want to request specific features, please do so by submitting a pull request in the Stream Swift GitHub repo.
We’re very excited about this release and what the broader iOS developer community will build with our SDK in the near future. Be sure to tag us on Twitter @getstream_io to show us what you’ve been working on! And if you need access to begin building, start our 30-day free trial at any point.