I was recently working on an iOS app where I needed a 1-to-1 chat feature. I was surprised that there wasn't an established market leader in this space considering how many apps use such a feature. When I saw this post I immediately thought "yep, that is a gap I'd seen in the market".

Some existing platforms included Scringo, Lobi SDK, QuickBlox. None seemed polished or customisable enough for my purposes. See more here: http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-existing-APIs-for-impleme...

I ended up using an open-source iOS chat UI control (https://github.com/jessesquires/MessagesTableViewController) and Firebase (here is a sample project of a real-time iOS chat app: https://github.com/firebase/firechat-ios). It was incredibly easy to setup a real-time chat app and provides me with full UI customisation and a flexible and scalable data backend.

Send and receive code:

    // Setup.
    self.firebase = [[Firebase alloc] initWithUrl:kFirechatNS];

    // Listen for messages (real-time).
    [self.firebase observeEventType:FEventTypeChildAdded withBlock:^(FDataSnapshot *snapshot) {
        // Add the chat message to the array.
        [self.chat addObject:snapshot.value];
        // Reload the table view so the new message will show up.
        [self.tableView reloadData];
    }];

    // Send message.
    [[self.firebase childByAutoId] setValue:@{@"name" : self.name, @"text": aTextField.text}];

Thoughts on Layer

If Layer was around when I was looking I would have tried it out, however I am happy with Firebase as my backend now. The API looks insanely easy to use though.

Media sharing features would be difficult to implement using what I described above so Layer would be advantageous here.

Great branding.

Also Layer, please make your iOS framework available on CocoaPods.

Everything you saw on the presentation will be available with very few lines of code. By using Layer SDK you will get messages sync cross devices, delivery notifications, delivery dismissal when a message has been opened (if using multiple devices), offline messaging thats syncs when you come back online. All you'll have to do is to define a search query for your UITableViewController and style your UITableViewCell and you are done, we'll take care of everything else.

As I understand Layer also has offline/sync functionality, contacts & some UI goodies to glue all of these together.

Thanks, this is great feedback! Please get in touch with us, we'd love to chat more - hello@layer.com

Their tagline is: "The open communications layer for the Internet".

I'm curious, what's open about it?

The Layer UI kit will be open-source from day one. The SDK and protocol will be opened up soon after.

Like mentioned in our presentation today - we are on a mission to make communications better for everyone, and we firmly believe that open is a better option. A bit more about Layer: https://layer.com/introducing-layer

Ron Palmeri has a knack for picking great teams and ideas. The concept of an infrastructure that can later become the standard of communication is great with huge potentials.

Internet was built to be the standard of communication and I feel Layer takes that spirit a level higher to application infrastructure.

I wasn't able to figure out if there is a strong security play, especially in the current zeitgeist. They touched on doctor nurse communication so perhaps security is an adoption.

thanks! security and privacy are huge aspects of what Layer is doing. given the team's background we will invest heavily to ensure that the core infrastructure and client side SDK are locked down. my guess is we'll have more people on that aspect alone than most developers can afford to deploy on the full stack.

is voice(instead of text) message available fro the current API?

This is great. Is there an open source version? This is great of quick prototyping, but eventually I would like to have full control over the stack.

Worried about cost lock in. Can you comment please?

At Layer we will always offer a free tier for low volume products, and only charge once an app gets meaningful traction.

We are here to help apps built on top of Layer win.

Thanks for the reply. Good to know.

Just watched the presentation at TC disrupt. We need a open communication framework so bad. I hope these guys succeed with their mission

Hey, if you are around soma you can swing by:)

Soooo, does anybody else immediately think about Diaspora here?

How does Layer compare to, say, e-mail on the one hand, and Diaspora on the other?

This all sounds like someone replying to them-self.

Edit: 15 comments besides mine, and 15 employees listed on the site. /conspiracy

Looks promising, excited to see how it develops and can't wait to try playing with it.

You can signup for beta access on http://layer.com.

Great job guys, really looking forward to see it in action.

Will there be a JavaScript API for the Web?

Yes, it is in the roadmap. Let's nail mobile first ;)

a much need communication platform...i'm definitely rooting for these guys!

Great domain name ;)