Send your first message
Sendbird UIKit for Android is a set of prebuilt UI components that allows you to easily craft an in-app chat with all the essential messaging features. Our development kit includes light and dark themes, fonts, colors and more. You can customize these components to create an interactive messaging interface unique to your brand identity.
Sendbird UIKit supports both open channels and group channels. Follow the guide below to start sending a message from scratch using Java
or Kotlin
.
Requirements
The minimum requirements for UIKit for Android are:
Android 5.0 (API level 21) or higher
Java 8 or higher
Support androidx only
Android Gradle plugin 4.0.1 or higher
Sendbird Chat SDK for Android 4.0.3 and later
Before you start
Before installing Sendbird Chat SDK, you need to create a Sendbird application on the Sendbird Dashboard, which comprises everything required in a chat service including users, messages, and channels. You will need the App ID
of your Sendbird application when initializing the Chat SDK.
Note: Each Sendbird application can be integrated with a single client app. Within the same application, users can communicate with each other across all platforms, whether they are on mobile devices or on the web.
Get started
You can start building a messaging experience in your app by installing Sendbird UIKit. This developer kit is an add-on feature to Sendbird Chat SDK so installing it will also install the core Chat SDK.
Step 1 Create a project
To get started, open Android Studio
and create a new project for UIKit in the Project window as follows:
- Click Start a new Android Studio project in the Welcome to Android Studio window.
- Select Empty Activity in the Select a Project Template window and click Next.
- Enter your project name in the Name field in the Configure your project window.
- Select your language as either Java or Kotlin from the Language drop-down menu.
- Make sure Use legacy android.support.libraries is unchecked.
- Select minimum API level as 21 or higher.
Step 2 Install UIKit
You can install UIKit for Android through Gradle
.
If using Gradle 6.7 or lower, add the following code to your root build.gradle
file:
Note: Make sure the above code block isn't added to your module
build.gradle
file.
If using Gradle 6.8 or higher, add the following to your settings.gradle
file:
Note: To learn more about updates to Gradle, see this release note.
Next, for all Gradle versions, open the build.gradle
file at the application level. For both Java
and Kotlin
, add the following code block and dependencies:
Before saving the build.gradle
file, check if you’ve enabled viewBinding
. Then, click the Sync button to apply all changes.
Note: UIKit SDK versions
2.1.1
or lower can be downloaded from JCenter until February 1, 2022. SDK versions higher than2.1.1
will be available on Sendbird's remote repository.
Step 3 Initialize SendbirdUIKit instance
To integrate and run Sendbird UIKit in your app, you need to initialize it first. You can initialize SendbirdUIKit
instance by passing the SendbirdUIKitAdapter
instance as an argument to a parameter in the SendbirdUIKit.init()
method. The SendbirdUIKit.init()
must be called once in the onCreate()
method of your app’s Application
instance.
Note: Local caching has now been added so that the client app can locally cache and retrieve channel and message data. The addition of this functionality requires the database to be reset and migrated. As a result of DB migration in the server, the initialization process of the
SendbirdUIKit
instance is now asynchronous and requires you to receive a callback function before you can move onto the next step. If the database fails to migrate, theonInitFailed()
method is called. If the database successfully migrates, theonInitSucceed()
method is called and you can proceed to the next step. Refer to the updated code below.
Step 4 Add BaseApplication
Add the created BaseApplication
to AndroidManifest.xml
.
Step 5 Display channel list
ChannelListActivity
is the starting point for launching UIKit in your application. By implementing the code below, you will see a complete list of group channels that you're a member of.
Step 6 Send your first message
You can now run the application on an emulator or a plugged-in device. To send a message, you must first create a group channel by clicking on the icon in the top-right corner. Then, you can select users you wish to invite as members to your channel. Once the channel has been created, type your first message and press send.
You've successfully sent your first message with Sendbird.