4 Must-Have Tutorials For Building an Android Chat App

Android and Realtime are a match made in heaven, using version 4 of the PubNub SDK. Not only do you get the power of the PubNub DSN, the new API gives you a typesafe pure-Java interface, with heavy use of the builder pattern to streamline configuration. Sunny Gleason created a four part series on his starter kit for Android and the V4 SDK. Following Sunny’s guide your realtime Android app will be up and running in no time.

Getting Started with the V4 Java SDK

Sunny shows you how to clone his starter kit right from within Android Studio, or create your own new project and pulling in the API from Maven with a small change to your Gradle config. Then he shows you how to navigate the project and customize your keys.

Send Messages with POJO Payloads

Sending and receiving messages with the native Android SDK is easy. Sunny’s starter kit uses the Jackson library to automatically serialize your POJOs. He also includes a PubSubListAdapter to automatically bridge network code to your UI.

Visual Presence

Presence is a way of showing who’s online, what they are doing, and how long since they’ve done something. It’s a crucial part of any high quality collaboration app. This blog shows you how to create a presence list with Sunny’s PresenceListAdapter, as well as configure the connection with different heartbeat settings.

High Performance Streaming

Android is a high performance mobile platform. Thanks to PubNub StreamController APIs you can manage high performance realtime connections by grouping multiple channels into a single unit. Sunny shows you how to add and remove channels from a group, message them in bulk, and even use wildcard subscriptions.

We hope you enjoy Sunny’s Android series. Be sure to check out our official Android SDK page, as well as our entire archive of Android-related blog posts.