Build a Multi-Platform Chat App Using Flutter & React Native.

Vigneshwar Published On September 20th, 2024 Tech Talks

Multi-platform apps are the new trend that allows users a convenient mode for using their favorite apps.

However, most apps nowadays are deployed on multiple platforms. Fortunately, more multi-platform-supporting languages are being developed and maintained simultaneously.

As the result of a recent survey from April 2023, More than half of the web traffic worldwide is from mobile phones; this clearly states the importance of cross-platform apps.

Without further talks, we can dive deep into this article to have a clear knowledge of multi-platform chat apps, tech stacks, and more.

 What Is Multi-Platform Development?

Multi-platform development is a term that refers to software or technology that facilitates functionalities on multiple platforms or operating systems.

An app that runs on operating systems such as mobile phone operating systems (e.g., Android and iOS), computer operating systems (e.g., Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS), and gaming consoles (e.g., Playstation and Xbox) is termed a multiplatform app.

Even multi-platform apps can work on more than just one platform. An app that works on mobile operating systems both iOS and Android is also known as a multi-platform app. 

 

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Importance of Multi platform Development

Based on the high global reach of technology, there are some key reasons why cross platform apps matter.

• Reach and accessibility: By developing an app that works on multiple platforms, developers can reach a larger target audience. And can be easily accessible by different operating system users.
• User convenience: Multi-platform apps help users who use a single app on multiple platforms, such as mobile, web, desktop, etc. It facilitates users choosing their preferred platform conveniently.
• Market competition: Multi-platform apps help you stand out in the market by placing you at the top. You can reach a wide audience despite being stuck in a narrow competition.
• Flexibility and Adaptability: Technology is a constantly evolving market with a new range of products and platforms every day. Multi platforms have the ability to function on various platforms and adopt new platforms easily.
• Collaboration and integration: Multi-platform helps you collaborate with other technology-related products or services. It also helps you integrate APIs, SDKs, Plug-ins, etc. with your application on different platforms.

On the whole, multi-platform apps help you reach global markets, avoid competition, keep your users convenient, adapt to new technology, and facilitate collaborations to scale up your business.

How to Choose the Best Framework for Multi Platform Chat App?

This might be a critical part to say in common. Yet choosing the best multi-platform framework is key to the success of your app.

There have been issues with this topic for a long time, As the app performance issue persists on Android, iOS, the Web, and the desktop.

But by evaluating certain metrics, you can avoid your app’s performance issues on multiple platforms and maintain smooth functionalities across platforms.

1. Dive deep into research.

Define your project requirements prior to choosing the platform. For example, If you are developing a chat app, you should be following certain elements.

Make a list of certain features that you are going to offer in your app, like Push notifications, Online presence indicators, read or delivery receipts, file sharing, stickers and emojis, etc.

After having clear data on your needs, move on to the next step.

2. Aim at your target audience.

Choose your target audience based on your business model. For the same chat app, choose whether you are targeting individuals or businesses.

If you are going with businesses, define your use cases that fit well with your business model and feature set.

And also make a clear note of the wide range of audiences you are going to focus on, such as global reach or fitting into a box of continents.

3. Pick the necessary platforms.

Once you have decided on your product, its features, and its target audience, you can easily conduct ongoing research about the most available platforms.

This is the point of deciding whether to go with cross-platform apps or native apps. If your target audience is found on a single platform, you can move to native apps.

But if your audience is vast and uses multiple platforms, then you might have to move to developing cross-platform apps.

4. The expertise of your development team

Now it’s time to rely on your development team. Know their expertise in cross-platform app development languages and limit your choices.

Having an expert team in your chosen programming language helps you create a better chat app and makes you stand out from the competition.

Maintaining a better UI and UX makes your users bounce back to you for more in terms of communications.

5. Understand the cost and prepare a budget.

It’s very important to understand the cost of developing a multi-platform app in every cross-platform framework.

This makes your job easier when choosing the best framework for your needs.

Moreover, each framework has its own pros and cons. Interact in developer community forums, seek topic-related discussions in third-party libraries, and conduct research with your competitor apps to clarify the end result.

By evaluating these conditions, MirrorFly facilitates multi platform messaging solutions with a few of the top frameworks. 

How Does MirrorFly Handle Cross-Platform Chat App Development?

MirrorFly provides feature-enriched cross-platform Messaging SDK for developers and enterprises. Most developers find MirrorFly a simple solution for their cross-platform chat app requirements for real-time communications.

It gives users the native-like performance of chat solutions on multiple platforms like iOS, Android, Web, and Desktop. 

Moreover, their SDKs are built on top tech stacks such as React JS, React Native, Flutter, Angular, and more. All these popular frameworks are widely used by developers to develop multi-platform apps.

They offer multi-platform chat solutions in twin business module

• SaaS: Cross Platform messaging API, voice and video SDK, upgrade based on needs with a monthly subscription.
• SaaP: Fully customizable white-labeled chat SDK at a one-time license cost.

Key features

• 99.999% uptime SLA
• Ultra-low latency
• Multi-tenant chat support
• Hassle-free integration
• Native-like performance

Tech Stacks for Native and Cross-platform Chat Apps in MirrorFly

Native apps are specifically built for a particular platform in their supporting language. The same set of codes cannot be reused to deploy the same app on any other platform. Here are a few examples of native app tech stacks:

• iOS apps: Apple’s native development tools such as Objective-C or Swift
• Android apps: Java or Kotlin and Google’s native development tool Android Studio and Android SDK
• Windows Desktop apps: Microsoft’s native development tools such as Visual Studio or.NET frameworks
• MacOS apps: Apple’s native development tools like the macOS SDK and Xcode
• Linux apps: Linux-based operating system programming languages such as C, C++, Python, etc.

Cross-platform apps have the ability to write code once and deploy it on different platforms. Here are some examples of frameworks for creating cross-platform apps,

• Flutter
• React Native
• Angular

MirrorFly secures the top rank in providing multi platform chat SDK for developers and enterprises for better communication.

How MirrorFly Multi-Platform Development overcome the challenges in Native Development?

Native apps and Multi-platform apps are more or less similar based on performance. Yet there are certain cons in native apps and MirrorFly’s chat SDKs eradicated those cons with the pros of multiplatform chat solutions.

Native app cons	MirrorFly Overcame those cons through Multiplatform
High cost	Low cost (You can build a multi-platform app at a cost of building 2 native apps)
Consumes a large amount of time	Minimal development time (Ex: You can integrate MirrorFly’s chat SDK in your preferred apps in less than 30 minutes)
Lack of updates	Frequent updates and bug fixes
Can be used only when downloaded	If you don’t wish to download then you don’t have, you can just sign in on your browser and start using
Very low volume of audience (Only people using the particular platform can be your audience)	Reach a global audience (Any person using any device can be your target audience)
One-time use code (You can use the code only once)	Code reusability (You can use the code multiple time)

Multi-platform apps and native apps have a similar amount of pros and cons. Choosing between them purely depends on your project requirements, technical expertise, budget constraints, and your audience group.

Leading Frameworks Involved in MirrorFly’s Multi-Platform Chat App Development

MirrorFly allows its users to chat in real-time from their convenient devices by offering a multi-platform chat SDK. Despite allowing users to chat on cross-platform devices, MirrorFly takes care of maintaining user experience similar to native app performances.

Multi-platform apps are specially made from a single code base with the ability to perform across platforms. It saves significant amounts of time and money, As it can facilitate a single code base and hot reload features.

Here are a few top frameworks offered by MirrorFly for integrating a multi-platform chat app in less than 20 minutes.

1. Flutter

Flutter is an open-source and free UI toolkit developed by Google. It allows users to write code for multi-platform apps. As a constantly evolving programming language, Flutter is focusing on eradicating its cons.

Extraordinary features

• Single codebase
• Hot reload features
• Widgets (pre-designed rich UI components)
• Fast development
• Wide range of developers in the community

Follow these steps to integrate MirrorFly Flutter chat APIs into your applications.

Step 1: Register your account with MirrorFly to get started.

Step 2: Once you’re in! You get access to your MirrorFly account ‘Overview page’ where you can find a license key for the further integration process

Step 3: Copy the license key from the ‘Application info’ section

Step 4: Add the following to your root build.gradle file in your Android folder. (Android dependency)

allprojects {
repositories {
google()
mavenCentral()
jcenter()
maven {
url "https://repo.mirrorfly.com/snapshot/"
}
}
}

Add the following dependencies in the app/build.gradle file.

android {
packagingOptions {
exclude 'META-INF/AL2.0'
exclude 'META-INF/DEPENDENCIES'
exclude 'META-INF/LICENSE'
exclude 'META-INF/LICENSE.txt'
exclude 'META-INF/license.txt'
exclude 'META-INF/NOTICE'
exclude 'META-INF/NOTICE.txt'
exclude 'META-INF/notice.txt'
exclude 'META-INF/ASL2.0'
exclude 'META-INF/LGPL2.1'
exclude("META-INF/*.kotlin_module")
}
}

Step 5: Check and Add the following code at end of your ios/Podfile (iOS dependency)

post_install do |installer|
installer.pods_project.targets.each do |target|
flutter_additional_ios_build_settings(target)
target.build_configurations.each do |config|
config.build_settings['IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET'] = '12.1'
config.build_settings['ENABLE_BITCODE'] = 'NO'
config.build_settings['APPLICATION_EXTENSION_API_ONLY'] = 'No'
config.build_settings['BUILD_LIBRARY_FOR_DISTRIBUTION'] = 'YES'
config.build_settings["EXCLUDED_ARCHS[sdk=iphonesimulator*]"] = "arm64"
end
end
end

Step 6: Now, enable all the below mentioned capabilities into your project.

Goto Project -> Target -> Signing & Capabilities -> Click + at the top left corner -> Search for the capabilities below

Step 7: Add the below dependencies in pubspec.yaml. (Flutter dependency)

dependencies:
mirrorfly_plugin: ^0.0.7

STEP 8: Run flutter pub get command in your project directory. You can use all classes and methods just with the following import statement

import 'package:mirrorfly_plugin/mirrorfly.dart';

To initialize the plugin, place the below code in your main.dart file inside the main function before runApp().

void main() {
WidgetsFlutterBinding.ensureInitialized();
Mirrorfly.init(
baseUrl: 'https://api-preprod-sandbox.mirrorfly.com/api/v1/',
licenseKey: 'Your_Mirrorfly_Licence_Key',
iOSContainerID: 'Your_iOS_app_Group_id');
runApp(const MyApp());
}

Use the below method to register a user in sandbox Live mode.

Mirrorfly.registerUser(userIdentifier).then((value) {
// you will get the user registration response
var userData = registerModelFromJson(value);
}).catchError((error) {
// Register user failed print throwable to find the exception details.
debugPrint(error.message);
});

Use the below method to send a text message to other users,

var userJid = await Mirrorfly.getJid(username);

Mirrorfly.sendTextMessage(message, jid).then((value) {
// you will get the message sent success response
var chatMessage = sendMessageModelFromJson(value);
});

Here the listeners would be called only when a new message is received from another user. To get more details please visit this callback listeners

Mirrorfly.onMessageReceived.listen(result){
// you will get the new messages
var chatMessage = sendMessageModelFromJson(result)
}

---

2. React Native

React Native is a popular open-source framework for JavaScript developed by Facebook. It allows users to deploy their apps on multiple platforms, such as iOS, Android, desktop, and the Web.

They have a predesigned set of rich UI components that give users the feel of native apps.

Extraordinary features

• Cross-platform development
• Native-like performance
• Component-based UI development
• Hot reloading
• Strong community and ecosystem

Follow these steps to integrate MirrorFly React Native chat APIs into your applications.

Step 1: Register your account with MirrorFly to get started.

Step 2: While creating an account you can provide your basic details that includes your name, organization details, work email, and contact number

Step 3: Once you’re in! You get access to your MirrorFly account ‘Overview page’ where you can find a license key ,Api base Url as well as downloadable JavaScript SDK files.

Step 4: Update all your packages.json files.

Step 5: Check your packages files have any duplicate if it is not working in iOS.

Step 6: Copy all the extracted files from the dist folder.

Step 7: Create a new folder inside your project and paste all the copied files into it.

Step 8: Create a file SDK.js to export the SDK Objects. Furthermore, can use the below given codes to import the SDKs,

function connectionListener(response) {
if (response.status === "CONNECTED") {
console.log("Connection Established");
} else if (response.status === "DISCONNECTED") {
console.log("Disconnected");
}
}
const initializeObj = {
apiBaseUrl: "https://api-preprod-sandbox.mirrorfly.com/api/v1",
licenseKey: "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
isTrialLicenseKey: true,
callbackListeners: {
connectionListener
},
};
await SDK.initializeSDK(initializeObj);

{
"statusCode": 200,
"message": "Success"
}

Step 9: You can use the below-given method to register a new user.

Step 10: Once you are registered, you will be provided with a username and password that you can utilize to make the connection with the server via connect method.

await SDK.register(`USER_IDENTIFIER`);
{
statusCode: 200,
message: "Success",
data: {
username: "123456789",
password: "987654321"
}
}

Connect to MirrorFly Server

Step 11: You can use the credentials that you have obtained while registration to make the connection with the server.

Step 12: Once you have created the connection successfully, you will be responded with an approval message as ‘statusCode of 200’ or else will get an execution error.

Step 13: With this you can also trace the connection status that you receive in connectionListener callback function.

Step 14: If you face any error while making a connection with the server, you will receive an error message with callback.

await SDK.connect(`USERNAME`, `PASSWORD`);

Finally, to send a message to another user you can use the below given method,

await SDK.sendTextMessage(`TO_USER_JID`, `MESSAGE_BODY`);

To receive a message from another user you must implement the messageListener function. It’s a function that will be triggered whenever you receive a new message or related event in one-to-one or group chat. Further to initialize the SDK, you need to add the below callback method during the process.

function messageListener(response) {

console.log(“Message Listener”, response);

}

---

3. Angular

Angular is a popular Javascript framework for creating complex projects developed by Google. It allows users to build dynamic, single-page applications and large-scale enterprise applications.

Angular is built on a typescript language, which facilitates object-oriented programming concepts and advanced tooling support.

Extraordinary features

• Code reusability
• Time and cost savings
• Consistent user experience
• Easier maintenance and updates
• Flexibility and scalability

Follow these steps to integrate MirrorFly Angular chat APIs into your applications.

Step 1: Register your account with MirrorFly to get started.

Step 2: Log into your Account

Step 3: Get the License key from the application Info’ section

Step 4: Install Mirrorfly SDK in your application

npm i mirrorfly-sdk

Step 5: Import the SDK into your application where you want

import * as SDK from "mirrorfly-sdk";

Step 6: To download the files from the Angular SDKs, click on the Download button.

Step 7: Extract the files from the downloaded zip file and copy them into your application.

Step 8: Create a new folder inside your project’s Root folder and paste all the copied files into it.

Step 9: Once the file has been copied, include the script file into your index.html

Step 10: Open your angular.json and search for the property by navigating the buttons : build => options => scripts.

Step 11: Here, you can find the array of scripts wherein you can add the relative file paths of respective downloaded SDK JS files.

Step 12: Now, add the below codes in the Root component (before @Component Decorator).

declare var SDK: any;

Step 13: Once you have added the SDK into Root component’s ngOnInit, initialize our SDKs within angular’s initialization method.

To begin with the initialization process of the chat SDK you are required to have certain data that responds to the changes in the connection status in the client’s app.

Now, paste the license key on the license key param and use the below given method to pass these data through the SDK for further processing.

const initializeObj = {
licenseKey: `LICENSE_KEY`,
callbackListeners: {},
};
await SDK.initializeSDK(initializeObj);

Step 14: You can use the below-given method to register a new user.

Step 15: Once you are registered, you will be provided with a username and password that you can utilize to make the connection with the server via connect method.

await SDK.register(`USER_IDENTIFIER`);

Sample Response:

{
statusCode: 200,
message: "Success",
data: {
username: "123456789",
password: "987654321",
isProfileUpdated: true,
isSandbox: true
}
}

Step 16: You can use the credentials that you have obtained while registration to make the connection with the server.
Step 17: Once you have created the connection successfully, you will be responded with an approval message as ‘statusCode of 200’ or else will get an execution error.
Step 18: With this you can also trace the connection status that you receive in connectionListener callback function.
Step 19: If you face any error while making a connection with the server, you will receive an error message with callback.

await SDK.connect(`USERNAME`, `PASSWORD`);

Sample Response

{
message: "Login Success",
statusCode: 200
}

Finally, to send a message to another user you can use the below given method,

await SDK.sendTextMessage({
toJid: "",
messageText: ""
});

Response Format

status code: "", // Number - status code
message: "", // String - Success/Error Message
data:
{
chatType: "", // String - Chat Type - "chat"
createdAt: "", // String - Message Created Time
deleteStatus: "", // Number - Delete Status
favouriteBy: "", // String - Favorited By - User
favouriteStatus: "", //Number - Favorite status
fromUserJid: "", // String - From User Jid
msgBody: {
message: "", // String - Message Body
message_type: "", // String - Message Type
nickname: "", // String - nick name
mentionedUsersIds: [] // Array of mentioned users
},
msgId: "", // String - Unique Message Id
msgType: "", // String - Group Message Type
publisherId: "", // String - user Id
timestamp: 1681185232000, // Number - TimeStamp - Milliseconds
},

Receive a Message

To receive a message from another user you must implement the messageListener function. It’s a function that will be triggered whenever you receive a new message or related event in one-to-one or group chat. Further to initialize the SDK, you need to add the below callback method during the process.

function messageListener(response) {
console.log("Message Listener", response);
}

With the help of these popular frameworks, MirrorFly enables multi-platform chat, voice, and video SDKs that resemble the performance of native apps. You can download the sample app and use it for free to explore the modern communication features.

Wrapping up

Gratitude for investing your time and coming this far. With your forecasting thoughts and the above-mentioned information, I am sure you will end up choosing the best framework for your multi platform app.

Note: MirrorFly is an easy way to integrate multi-platform chat SDK and UI kit for your business communications.

All the best for creating your cross-platform app. If you have any queries related to this article, kindly post them in the comment section below. I would be happy to assist you.