Intro and Background

Info on how the clients were coded, what features they have, how to contribute, and more.

Background

All clients are coded in Flutter and Dart. Our first stable release was published June 15th, 2021, after extensive closed alpha and public beta testing since October of 2020. Along this journey we have learned quite a bit about development in Flutter, and we'd like to share that, along with other things, in the form of this documentation.

Why Flutter?

We were choosing between Flutter and React Native to be our framework for the project. Initially, we ended up going with React Native because most of the developers were familiar with JavaScript and React development.

However, React proved to be difficult for us when creating the UI. We wanted our app to look like iMessage, but with a bit of our own twist - this meant a lot of blur, opacity, and bouncy scrolling. At the time, React did not have great support for these types of things, while with Flutter, it was as simple as providing decoration to a Container, or different ScrollPhysics to a scrollable widget.

We did not consider native development because we figured that development would be slow and clunky, even if the app might be more performant and memory efficient - the tradeoff would not be worth it.

Features

Send & receive texts, media, and location
View tapbacks/reactions, stickers, and replies
Create new chats (macOS 11+ has limited support while macOS 10 has full support)
View read/delivered timestamps
Mute or archive conversations
Robust theming engine
Choose between an iOS or Android-style interface
Lots of customizations and options to personalize your experience