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Overview

Building on top of the Stream Chat API, the Stream Chat iOS components include everything you need to build feature-rich and high-functioning chat user experiences out of the box.

We have component libraries available for both UIKit and SwiftUI. Each library includes an extensive set of fast performing and customizable UI components which allow you to get started quickly with little to no plumbing required. The libraries support:

  • Rich media messages
  • Reactions
  • Threads and quoted replies
  • Text input commands (ex: Giphy and @mentions)
  • Image and file uploads
  • Video playback
  • Read state and typing indicators
  • Channel and message lists
  • Push (APN or Firebase)
  • Offline storage
  • Voice messages
  • macOS
  • and a lot more.

Before getting started with our docs, we recommend going through our tutorials for the UIKit and SwiftUI SDKs.

Architecture​

StreamChat Swift SDK consists of three separate frameworks:

  • StreamChatUI provides a set of reusable and customizable UI components to add chat to your UIKit application.
  • StreamChatSwiftUI provides a set of reusable and customizable UI components to add chat to your SwiftUI application.
  • StreamChat is the low-level client that provides the main chat functionality, including offline storage and optimistic updates. You can use it directly in case you want to build your own UI layer for the chat.

We suggest using either StreamChatUI or StreamChatSwiftUI to most of our customers. Unless your UI is completely different from the common industry standard, you should be able to customize the built-in components to match your needs.

The UI SDKs provide both ready-made components that you can directly integrate (and customize) in your apps, or you can build your own, by reacting to the state we expose and re-using our components as building blocks, if needed.

You can learn more about how the state is exposed on this page and in the low-level client docs.

note

You can use this library to develop OSX application by using the StreamChat framework

Dependencies​

The SDK tries to keep the list of external dependencies to a minimum, these are the dependencies currently used:

StreamChatUI​

  • Nuke for loading images
  • SwiftyGif for high performance gif rendering
  • StreamChat the low-level client for the Stream Chat API

StreamChatSwiftUI​

  • Nuke for loading images
  • NukeUI for loading images
  • Gifu for high performance gif rendering
  • StreamChat the low-level client for the Stream Chat API
note

Starting 4.6.0, and in order to improve the developer experience, dependencies are hidden inside our libraries.

Choosing the right SDK​

When integrating with our chat platform, you get to choose which SDK you would like to integrate with.

Our best options are either the UIKit or SwiftUI SDKs. We suggest you choose what is closest to your current App.

Note that integrating our SwiftUI SDK into a UIKit based app is fully supported. It could provide you and your development team an amazing opportunity to get started with SwiftUI in your codebase.

Both UI SDKs expose a channel list and a channel component.

The channel list component consists of a channel list header, channel list and other helper views (such as search, swipe actions, and more). You can learn more about the channel list in UIKit and SwiftUI in our docs.

The channel component consists of a channel header, message list, message composer and other helper views (such as reactions overlay, different media pickers, threads etc). More details about these components can be found in our UIKit and SwiftUI docs.

Upgrade and Versioning Strategy​

The StreamChat Swift SDK adheres to the semantic versioning rules.

  • Bug fixes and behavior improvements cause patch version bump.
  • New features are shipped with an increased minor version.
  • Incompatible changes in the API will cause a major version increase.

Occasionally, the SDK can include visual changes (whitespace, color changes, sizing, etc) in minor versions, as we are continuously improving the default look of our UI components. Bumping the major version for such changes would not be practical.

How Should I Specify My Dependency Version?​

You should either use a fixed version, or an optimistic operator (a.k.a. squiggly arrow), with all three versions specified.

For example with CocoaPods:

pod 'StreamChat', '~> 4.0.0'

To stay up-to-date with our updates and get a detailed breakdown of what's new, subscribe to the releases of getstream/stream-chat-swift by clicking the "watch" button. You can further tweak your watch preferences and subscribe only to the release events.

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