Introducing Sendbird UIKit: Get chat running in minutes (yes, minutes)

We’re excited to announce the launch of the new Sendbird UIKit for iOS, Android, and React.

With Sendbird UIKit you can now use a set of rich, prebuilt UI components, to create a modern messenger experience in your app in just under 10 minutes. That’s right – in under 10 minutes.

From the overall theme to individual styles such as colors and fonts, UI components can be fully customized to create a full-featured chat experience with minimal development effort.

Sample iOS app screens created with SendBird UIKit

Sendbird UIKit themes, key functions, and common components

Sendbird UIKit comes in two beautiful themes – a light theme and a dark theme, which you can further customize to create the experience that matches your brand.

The key functions of Sendbird UIKit include the ability to create rich chat UX, handle chat features, and make real-time updates in your app to – list channels, chat in a channel, send media and files in a chat, configure channel settings, create a channel, invite users, and list channel members.

In addition to themes and key functions, Sendbird UIKit also provides – components to compose user profiles, a string set that contains common strings that are used to compose a chat screen and a beautifully designed icon set that contains icons to compose chat screens.

A few of our beautifully designed chat screen icons

The icons in the icon set represent common functionality such as profile image, loading screen, loading message, send message, invite member, member list, message sent, message delivered, message read, photos library, channel members, leave channel, notifications, channel message, create channel, copy message, delete message, edit message, leave channel, camera app, and many more such messaging essentials that users have come to love in their favorite messenger applications.

But this is just the start. We will be continuously shipping additional components such as message reactions that drive engagement, product carousels, and more. Our goal is to minimize if not eliminate chat UX work for customers who want something pre-built while still retaining the power and flexibility of an embedded API solution.

All of this is on top of a fully managed chat back-end infrastructure that scales to tens of millions of monthly active users and millions of peak connections per app, has a long list of best-of-breed features consumable via an API, and is used by some of the most innovative brands in the world such as Reddit, Gojek, Headspace and Delivery Hero.

If you’re a business that’s looking to get started with chat in your app quickly, you now have the complete UI toolkit to build a full-featured chat experience that is flexible to match your app’s UX and brand, and gets you from the first line of code to the first message sent in under 10 minutes.

Check out this demo to see Sendbird UIKit in action.

Ready to get started?

You can find Sendbird UIKit documentation for your preferred platform in the following links – iOS, Android, React. Every platform documentation comes with beautifully designed sample apps that are available for download from GitHub to inspire possibilities of what you can build.

We’re really excited to get this into your hands and can’t wait to see what you will build.