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Android

How to make a chat screen

I finished teamtreehouse's Ribbit app. I'm trying to figure out how to make a chat screen. I want to make it so that two users can send messages to each other and the text is displayed on top of a text bubble. The problem is i'm not exactly sure on where to start. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can put this in with the Ribbit app?

Yes. I'm still not sure on where to start for this project.

1 Answer

Jonathan Etienne
Jonathan Etienne
24,572 Points

Hi Jordan,

I can certainly guide you on this. To achieve your "chat screen", I would highly suggest you to integrate a third party free service called "sinch", with another third party system called "parse" used as the database to manage your users data.

The reason being is you can build your own chat system from scratch, and I can guide you on this but if you're looking for scalability, and if you want this work across multiple devices (iphone, android, desktop), these tools allows you to communicate with all type of devices using various programming languages (javascript, java, xcode...).

Below is a detailed guide on how you would integrate it: https://www.sinch.com/tutorials/android-messaging-tutorial-using-sinch-and-parse/

Thank you so much! I will have to try sinch with parse. I think this is exactly what I am looking for.