Creating the Chat UI

The chat UI we are about to create must display the message thread of an active conversation as well as enable a user to send a new message to the individual they are chatting with. We will start this section by creating the view layout that will be rendered to the user.

Creating the chat layout

We will make use of an open source library called ChatKit to create the chat view's layout. ChatKit is an Android library that provides flexible components for chat user interface implementation in Android projects as well as utilities for chat-user-interface data management and customization.

We added ChatKit to the Messenger project with the following line of code in the build.gradle script:

implementation...