Product Updates

Easily Add Chat to Your App with Kotlin and Swift Chat SDKs

4 min read • Lukasz Smacki on Sep 25, 2024
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At PubNub, we believe that creating chat experiences should be simple, without requiring developers to manage the complexities of real-time infrastructure. With that mission in mind, we are thrilled to introduce our new Kotlin Chat SDK for Android and Swift Chat SDK for iOS. These SDKs give mobile developers the tools they need to quickly integrate chat functionality into their apps while maintaining complete control over the UI and user experience.

What Do PubNub’s Kotlin and Swift SDKs Offer?

The Kotlin and Swift Chat SDKs make it easy for developers to integrate custom chat functionality into their apps with pre-built chat features such as unread message counts, read receipts, user presence detection, and more. Developers can use PubNub’s proven infrastructure, designed for reliability, security, and flexibility. Whether you're building one-on-one, group, or public chat experiences, PubNub’s SDKs provide tools that speed up development while offering the flexibility to customize for specific use cases.

What Sets PubNub’s Chat SDK Apart?

Our SDKs stand out due to their architecture, which provides features built on best practices right out of the box, giving developers a head start in their chat integration process. With PubNub, you don’t have to worry about building complex backend features like real-time message delivery, message storage, or user presence—these are all handled automatically. Plus, the SDK allows you to extend and customize these features with just a few lines of code.

Key Features of the Kotlin and Swift SDKs

  • Fast Development Developers can quickly integrate chat functionality without needing to build out infrastructure or rip apart prebuilt UI elements. PubNub provides the backend while giving you full control over the UI, ensuring that the chat solution fits seamlessly into your app’s design.

  • Use Case Agnostic Create chat environments tailored to your specific use case. Whether it’s one-on-one, group chats, or public channels, the SDKs allow you to integrate unique chat functionalities with minimal effort.

  • Built-In Advanced Messaging The SDK comes equipped with features like message pinning, unread message counts, and message threading to help you deliver a modern chat experience. It can send events like read receipts or user invitations directly from user to user, eliminating the need for server-side logic. Developers may even create custom events, such as for managing audio or video conversations, enabling integration with other application features.

  • User and Message Moderation PubNub's BizOps Workspace allows developers to easily manage users and messages through an intuitive, no-code interface. The SDK includes helper functions for user access management and message reporting, enabling businesses to create safe and moderated chat spaces.

  • Management Tools Manage chat and communication effortlessly using PubNub's BizOps Workspace, which offers user management (view, filter, and update users), channel management (search and modify chat channels), and membership management (assign and remove members from channels). These tools make it easy to stay in control of your chat environment.

  • Scalable and Reliable Infrastructure Powered by PubNub’s globally distributed pub/sub network, these SDKs are built on a platform with 99.999% uptime and sub-30ms latency. With geo-redundancy and enterprise-grade security and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA), you can rest assured that your chat is always available and secure at any scale.

  • Comprehensive Documentation and Support PubNub’s SDKs are supported by detailed documentation, tutorials, and 120+ code snippets to help developers get started quickly. Our team of solution architects and support specialists are also available to guide you through integration and solve any challenges you encounter.

Why Kotlin and Swift?

By offering SDKs specifically for Kotlin and Swift, we’ve tailored our solution to meet the needs of Android and iOS developers. Kotlin’s modern syntax and multi-platform capabilities make it ideal for Android, while Swift’s performance and flexibility make it a natural fit for iOS development. With these SDKs, developers can integrate robust, real-time chat solutions into their mobile apps with minimal friction.

Key Use Cases

PubNub’s Chat SDK is horizontal in nature, making it ideal for a wide range of applications. Some of the most common use cases include:

  • Telehealth: Secure doctor-patient communication.

  • Customer Support: Allow users to interact with customer service in real-time.

  • Education: Enable teacher-student discussions or virtual classrooms.

  • Delivery Apps: Facilitate communication between drivers and customers.

  • Gaming and Communities: Power group chats, forums, or in-game interactions.

  • Live Streaming: Provide interactive real-time chat for live streaming events.

  • Team Collaboration: Project coordination within workplace or remote teams.

No matter where you need chat, PubNub’s SDKs have you covered.

Key Benefits of PubNub’s Chat SDKs

  • Speed and Flexibility: Quickly implement chat without compromising on customization or flexibility.

  • Scalability and Reliability: Leave the infrastructure to PubNub, with 99.999% uptime and ultra-low latency.

  • Easy Management and Moderation: Manage and moderate your chat with tools built right into the BizOps Workspace.

  • Comprehensive Platform Coverage: With support for Javascript, Kotlin, Swift, Unreal, Unity, developers can build real-time chat across the most popular platforms.

Get Started Today

Getting started with PubNub’s Kotlin Chat SDK or Swift Chat SDK is easy:

The Future of Real-Time Chat

At PubNub, we’re continually enhancing our Chat SDKs to deliver new features, improved performance, and better integration. As we move forward, we will continue to integrate more capabilities, including deeper integration with BizOps Workspace for even easier moderation and management, and expanding our platform to support languages and frameworks.

Try our Kotlin Chat SDK and Swift Chat SDK today, and see how easy it can be to deliver a custom, real-time chat experience to your users.

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