New  Push Notifications

Push notifications are a critical part of what we offer and we are very excited to make it available on our Flutter SDK. Similar to our React Native SDK, we have abstracted registering of the device token among other things to make adding push notifications a fairly straightforward thing. You can check out our documentation for a step by step guide on what you'll need to do to setup push notifications on Android and iOS through Firebase and Apple Push Notification service respectively.

improvement File Upload on Android

Due to the nature of the WebView implementation on Android and limitations of the Flutter equivalent, we had initially shipped the Flutter SDK without support for file uploads on Android. At the time of writing, various factors prevent the maintainers of the Flutter Webview plugin from shipping this feature. We believe file upload is a core component of TalkJS and so we forked the plugin and added it to cater to our Flutter SDK.

Other than your users on Android being able to upload files, there's nothing to be done from your end. Remember, you can always enable or disable file attachment for a specific role through the dashboard.

New Expo SDK

To properly support users of Expo's Managed Workflow, we have released a new package: @talkjs/expo. This package is identical to @talkjs/react-native except it has push notifications disabled. This is because the push notification libraries used have native code which make them incompatible with the Managed Workflow. 

If you need push notifications, you can send them from your own backend using our webhooks or you can use @talkjs/react-native and create a development build for your project using EAS Build or eject to the bare workflow.

The versioning for this new package will be identical to @talkjs/react-native

Better Notifications

We have changed the libraries we use for push notifications which has allowed us to greatly improve notifications, particularly on Android. Notifications are now shown as Conversations and grouped accordingly. Applies only to devices running Android 7.0 (API level 24) and up.

Images sent will also appear in the notifications. (Android only).

The function, registerPushNotificationHandlers, now allows for more configuration options when creating Android's Notification Channels. It also supports providing iOS notification related permissions you want your app to have.

As part of these changes you'll need to update your android/build.gradle file by adding the following block to the repositories section of allprojects:

maven {
url "$rootDir/../node_modules/@notifee/react-native/android/libs" }

Better Error Reporting

It should now be clearer what is wrong with your code. Should you encounter a scenario where an error has occurred but React Native's Logbox doesn't show, notify us via our livesupport.

Other changes

• Add support for Guest Access through the addition of asGuest prop in Chatbox.
• Enable capturing of keyup events in Chatbox through the captureKeyboardEvents and onKeyup props.
• Added the methods: getText and typeText to MessageField.
• Changed oneOnOneId to also accept User Objects.
• Changed showFeedHeader default to false.
• Fix issue when user and/or conversation synchronization were disabled.
• Deprecated the following props in ConversationList: feedConversationTitleMode, thirdParties, onBlur and onFocus.
• Deprecated the following props in Chatbox: chatSubtitleMode, chatTitleMode, thirdParties, translateConversations, onBlur and onFocus.

New We have some exciting news! We have shipped a React Native SDK 😄.

Prior to this release, getting TalkJS running in React Native applications required developers to perform multiple tasks like creating an HTML file for the webview, passing parameters from the app to the JavaScript running in the webview and sometimes even adding handlers so the code in the webview could call back to the app.

With the React Native SDK you can get TalkJS running in your React Native application with a few lines of code:

<TalkRn.Session appId='YOUR_APP_ID' me={me}>
  <TalkRn.Chatbox conversationBuilder={conversationBuilder} />
</TalkRn.Session>

The new SDK makes it easier to use TalkJS in React Native applications by providing React Native Components that will feel natural to anyone using React Native.

Developers will now write significantly less code, save time and also make their code less error-prone. Additionally by using the SDK developers are guaranteed of backwards compatibility, meaning their code will always run even as TalkJS evolves.

So go ahead and check out our React Native Getting Started Guide.

We can't wait to see the cool stuff you are building!