We made Sendbird UIKit open source — build the chat workflow of your dreams faster
In April 2020 we launched Sendbird UIKit, a flexible development kit made from elegant UI components integrated with the Sendbird Chat SDK that let you build in-app chat in minutes. The Sendbird UIKit is the fastest way to build modern in-app chat experiences anywhere.
Since the launch, we’ve received an overwhelming response. Customers, from small upstarts to the largest and fastest growing unicorns, have embraced UIKit and are using it to develop elegant chat experiences efficiently.
One thing that we kept hearing from our customers and developers was their desire to adapt the UIKit freely to their own use cases.
We’ve paid attention to this need and have been hard at work to make this a reality for our customers. One year since launch, we’re very excited to announce that we are making Sendbird UIKit open source. With this announcement, Sendbird UIKit will become the fastest and most flexible, UI-centric modern development toolkit for developers to build chat in apps. This will allow them to extend the UIKit to any use case, vertical or workflow they can imagine.
So, whether you are a social and communities application trying to build social engagement between large groups of users, or a payments wallet trying to power peer-to-peer interactions, or a marketplace trying to intricately integrate a chat workflow in your own core buyer to seller workflow — Sendbird UIKit will allow you easily adapt it to the user experience that makes the most sense for your users.
The only UIKit you need.
Sendbird UIKit source code is now available in the UIKit sample app repository in Github. Developers can freely fork the UIKit source code and use it to build for their own use case.
In case your team needs to transform a design or build on top of a design, Sendbird UIKit design resources are provided as Figma, Sketch files. Also refer to this article for detailed help learning how to use these resources.
Together, with the ability to customize UIKit code and design, we hope customers can build the in-app chat experiences they dream of and ship them faster.
Sendbird UIKit is a top priority for Sendbird and we’re continuing to invest in this product as more customers start to adopt it as their go-to source for building chat in-app. With every new release of UIKit we will add new chat features and continue to update the source code and the design resources so customers can have the build the latest features in their app.
The Sendbird UIKit open source is provided under the MIT open source license.
Before you get your hands on the source code, we wanted to quickly share with you a few community guidelines for the Sendbird UIKit open source.
- We recommend that you use Sendbird UIKit open source when the standard Sendbird UIKit does not completely fit your use case. We also recommend that you use Sendbird UIKit open source if you’d like to use a Sendbird Chat SDK feature that is currently not supported in the standard Sendbird UIKit.
- At this point, we will extend limited support if you use the Sendbird UIKit open source code and fork it (clone and edit the code in your own repository) as we won’t be able to transparently understand the code fully.
- At this point, we are not accepting direct contributions to the Sendbird UIKit source code. If you were to discover a bug or would like to suggest improvements to the source code, please share them with us in the Sendbird UIKit community forum.
We’re really excited to bring the Sendbird UIKit open source to you, to learn more on how to get started please visit the links to the Github repositories:
As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback. We’d love to learn from you.
