Android Introduction

The Android SDK enables you to build any type of chat or messaging experience for Android. It consists of three major components:

• Client: The client handles all API calls and receives events.
• Offline: The offline library stores the data, implements optimistic UI updates, handles network failures, and exposes StateFlow objects that make it easy to build your own UI on.
• UI: The UI package includes ViewModels and custom views for common things like a channel list, message list, message input etc.

We typically recommend building a prototype with the full UI package. This is the fastest way to ensure that you have the integration set up correctly in combination with the backend and other teams. After that, about half of our customers launch in production with our UI package.

There are some limitations to Android UI reusability, so if you have more complicated design needs, you'll want to drop down a level to the offline package. For most applications, you won't have to use the client directly (note that it's a lot of work to keep the chat state updated manually, which you'd have to do when using the client).

Before going through these docs, we recommend trying out the Android Chat tutorial and taking a look at the Android Chat Sample App. You can also check out our API docs for more information, as well our source code on GitHub.

The online API tour is also a nice way to learn about how the API works. It's in-browser, and therefore Javascript based, but the ideas are pretty much the same in Kotlin.

Getting Started

Confused about "Getting Started"?

This guide quickly brings you up to speed on Stream’s Chat API. The API is flexible and allows you to build any type of chat or messaging. Note that if you build on our UI components, you won't need to call into this API too often after the initialization of the library. Add one of the three packages below to your dependencies for your module/app level build.gradle file: