Introducing ChatCubie v1.0 – A New Era of Communication

ChatCubie v1.0 is officially live at chatcubie.com. It is the first product we shipped, and getting it to a version we were willing to call 1.0 took considerably longer than the first working version did.

What ChatCubie is

A communication platform that runs on the web and on Android, covering the things people actually do all day: messaging, voice calls, video calls, and group conversations.

• Real-time messaging with delivery and read receipts, replies, and media sharing
• Voice and video calling built on WebRTC, with proper ringtones and call states
• Group chats and channels for conversations bigger than two people
• End-to-end security on the paths that carry your content

The parts that were hard

Calling

Text messaging is a solved problem. Calling is not. WebRTC gives you the transport, and everything else — signalling, ICE negotiation, what happens when the callee's phone is asleep, what happens when someone answers on two devices — is yours to build.

The state machine for a call turned out to be the most intricate code in the app. Ringing, answered, declined, missed, dropped mid-call, network switched from wifi to mobile data. Each of those needs to leave both sides in a sane state, and a bug in any one of them is the kind of bug users notice immediately.

Notifications that arrive

A chat app whose notifications are late is a chat app people stop using. Getting Firebase Cloud Messaging to deliver reliably, and to wake the app into the right screen when tapped, took more iterations than the messaging layer itself.

Making it feel fast

Opening a conversation should be instant, and it is not instant if you fetch the entire history from the network every time. Local caching with Hive, cached network images, and compressing images before upload rather than after took the app from acceptable to quick.

Speed is not a feature you add at the end. It is a consequence of decisions made throughout.

What is next

ChatCubie is currently in closed testing on the Play Store while we build up the tester base Google requires before production access opens. In the meantime the web app is fully available.

The roadmap from here: desktop clients, richer channel tools, and connecting ChatCubie into the wider Cubie ecosystem so a single account works across every product.

Thank you to everyone who tested early builds and reported the bugs that made 1.0 worth releasing.