Learning Mobile Development

Making Simple Android Chat App

Using WebSocket to help make a chat app is simple

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

In Android App, we can make a network call and get some data. But do we auto receive data without the need to pull data? Perhaps a push notification? But that’s too heavy if we just want a quick response like a chat app.

Using WebSocket make this all possible, and simple!

Here I’m sharing the simple way to set up an Android App as below, that you can chat with a web or another app, all develop locally without needing a 3rd party tool like Firestore.

Build your own local server

Since we are not using FireStore, we can easily build a local web chat server as shared in the blog below. It’s just using node.js behind the scene. All can be run locally (or an actual server if you deploy it).