stfalcon-studio/chatkit

ChatKit is an Android library that provides ready-made UI components for building chat screens in mobile apps. It was made by Stfalcon, a software development studio, and is released under the Apache 2.0 license. The library gives developers three main components to drop into their app. The first is a dialogs list view that shows a list of conversations, supporting both one-on-one and group chats, with indicators for unread messages and a preview of the most recent message. The second is a messages list view that shows the back-and-forth of a conversation, handles both incoming and outgoing messages, supports image messages alongside text, groups messages by date automatically, and supports scrolling back through history. The third is a message input view, a text box with send controls ready to be placed at the bottom of a chat screen. All three components are designed to be customized. Colors, fonts, sizes, and drawable resources can be changed through Android's styling system without touching the library code. For more significant changes, developers can supply their own view holders to control exactly how each message bubble or dialog row looks and behaves. The library does not dictate how images are loaded, so developers can use whichever image-loading library they already have in their project. Additional features include link highlighting inside messages, a message selection mode for actions like copy or delete, and support for custom animations on the list views. The library works with developers' own data model classes directly, without requiring conversion to intermediate types. Installation is done by adding the JitPack repository to the project's build configuration and then adding the library as a Gradle dependency. A sample app is included in the repository and is also available on the Google Play Store for trying out the components before integrating them.