// the find
chat-sdk/chat-sdk-android
Chat SDK Android - Open Source Mobile Messenger
Chat SDK Android is a drop-in messaging framework for Android that handles the full chat stack — UI, persistence, real-time sync — on top of Firebase or XMPP backends. It's aimed at developers who need to ship a working chat feature fast without building it from scratch. The feature set is legitimately wide: group chats, location messages, QR code contact adding, multiple auth methods.
The backend abstraction is real — you can switch between Firestore, Firebase Realtime DB, and XMPP (ejabberd, Prosody, OpenFire, etc.) without rewriting your UI layer. The customization surface is well-thought-out: you can override individual Activities/Fragments, swap message view holders, add custom message types, and retheme without forking the core. GreenDao + RxAndroid for persistence and threading is a reasonable stack choice for Java Android circa v5 — keeps things predictable. The demo app and API cheat sheet examples are actually useful for onboarding rather than just hello-world noise.
It's Java with no Kotlin migration path evident in the core modules, which is a real friction point in 2026 — Android development has moved on and interop friction adds up. The license structure is a trap: standard modules go GPL if you exceed 1M MAU, but the features most production apps need (read receipts, typing indicators, blocking, E2E encryption) are all behind the paid Patreon/commercial tier regardless of size, making the 'free and open source' framing misleading. The README itself warns that v5 was shipping breaking fixes every few days, and the last push was January 2026 — not clear this is actively maintained at this point. At ~20MB for all modules, the binary footprint is large enough to matter on apps where APK size is a constraint.