Almost all brands these days need an app with chat functionality so that users can interact with each other or connect to their customer support easily. In this article, we will show you how to build a chat app for Android devices. Throughout this tutorial, we use the most lightweight, clean, and Google’s preferred programming language for Android apps – Kotlin. The development environment is Android Studio and the third-party chat SDK is from MirrorFly Chat.
Step 1: Create a Project in Android Studio
In order to develop an Android app, you need to create a project in the Android Studio IDE. First, be sure to install the latest version of Android Studio IDE from their Official Website. After installation, launch the IDE. It will open the Welcome to Android Studio window. Here, you can create a New Project.
On the next page, choose Empty Activity and click on Next. This will take you to the Configuration Window
In this step, you will have to enter a few details needed for the app. Enter your app’s name, save location, and choose Kotlin from the language’s dropdown menu as we will be using it to create this app. Since we will be using the latest version of Android, choose the minimum requirement for API level as Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and click on Finish.
Step 2: Add Build Dependencies into Your Project’s Library
One of our favorite reasons for building an app in Android studio is that – it is easy to add third-party modules to our build as dependencies. And that’s what we will do now! In the main menu of the project, navigate to Gradle Scripts > build.gradle. In this location, you can find 2 gradle files – one for the project and another for the app. We will be dealing with the app gradle because this gradle is the key zone that allows us to add our chat features to our app. Now, we already have my downloaded AAR files from MirrorFly that contains all the chat feature modules we need for our app.
Note: If you’d like to download it, it is available for a free trial on their official website. You can create an account and get access to it.
Add these dependencies to the app/build.gradle. Once you complete this step, this is what the main menu of your project’s navigation section will look like:
Next, you need to build the below codes for your project:
