How Our iOS Team Built the SwiftUI SDK Message List

Building a responsive and performant chat interface in SwiftUI, particularly for large-scale applications like live streams or group chats, presents unique challenges related to responsiveness, media handling, and memory management. To overcome these, the developers opted for SwiftUI, leveraging its declarative nature and reactive capabilities to efficiently manage state changes and redraws. They specifically chose LazyVStack over List for its flexibility in handling scroll requirements and to avoid additional complexity in removing separators on iOS 14. To address memory constraints when handling extensive message lists, the team implemented strategies like aggressive message loading and setting UUIDs to reset views periodically, reducing memory usage. Despite encountering some performance issues, particularly with UIKit components, they found solutions through detailed analysis and adjustments, confirming SwiftUI as a viable framework for production-ready chat applications. The team's open-sourced SDK continues to evolve, aiming to enhance user experience by integrating new features and optimizations.