Build Open Source iOS Messenger

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

In this part, we will download the source code for iOS Messenger, build and run it on a real iPhone device.

Let’s get started.

Prerequisites

Before we dive into building and running a fully featured Messenger for iOS, ensure that you’ve read the following.

Downloading the Source Code

The latest code for the iOS Messenger is always updated and pushed on messenger-app-ios repository.

There are multiple ways of “downloading” code from GitHub.

If you have git installed, this is a recommended approach as you can quickly sync and stay up to date with the latest version. This is also a preferred way of downloading the code if you decide to contribute to the project.

To download, open a terminal and issue following commands:

$ mkdir Messenger
$ cd Messenger
$ git lfs install
$ git clone https://github.com/mesibo/messenger-app-ios.git

Download the code as a zip file

You can also download the complete iOS Messenger source code as a zip file. Although simple, the downside of this approach is that you will have to download the complete source code every time it is updated on the repository.

Click on the Download button to start downloading.

Download

Once the download completes, unzip into a folder.

WARNING! zip file will be quite large due to the inclusion of bitcode enabled frameworks. git clone is the recommended approach.

Stay Up-to-date

Whatever approach you take to download the code, it is important to stay up-to-date with the latest changes, new features, fixes, etc. Ensure to Star(*) the project on GitHub to get notified whenever the source code is updated.

Star

Build and Run

In this part, we will build the code as it is and run the app. In the next section we will learn about customizing.

Building the code is as simple as:

  1. Launch Xcode
  2. Open the project from the folder where you have downloaded the code using the menu File -> Open
  3. Build using menu Product -> Build
  4. It may take a while to build the project for the first time.
  5. Once the build is over, run on the device using the menu Product -> Run
  6. That’s it, you should see the welcome screen like below.

Log in using your phone number. Note that, for this demo, you need to generate OTP yourself by log in to your mesibo account and clicking on the Demo Apps menu for instructions. In the later part of this tutorial, you will learn how to send OTP to your users automatically.

Conclusion

In this part, we have built and run the iOS Messenger app.

In part 4, we will learn about customizing applications.

On to Part 4 >>

open, source, whatsapp, mesibo, ios, overview