Chatto is a lightweight framework for building chat applications in Swift.
The framework addresses the challenge of creating performant, extensible messaging interfaces on iOS. It handles the complex mechanics of chat UI by calculating collection view changes and layouts in background threads, enabling smooth performance even with thousands of messages. The tool supports bidirectional pagination with autoloading, message count contention for fast rotation, and interactive keyboard dismissal. A companion framework called ChattoAdditions provides ready-made cells for text and photo message bubbles alongside an extensible input bar component.
Chatto suits developers building iOS chat applications who need a foundation that prioritizes performance and extensibility without imposing rigid architectural constraints. The framework's design allows customization of message types and UI components through its extension points. It is available through CocoaPods and Carthage, or can be integrated manually as a submodule or embedded framework.
The project maintains an active contribution process with a dedicated gitter community channel for questions and a formal contribution guide for bug reports and pull requests. Development activity shows ongoing engagement with the codebase through build status monitoring and code coverage tracking.
