When we set out to build an iMessage extension for Lisk Mobile using React Native, we immediately hit an exciting challenge. As it turns out, when it comes to third-party applications, Apple likes developers to play by its own rules. If a company wants to benefit Apple’ new features of the tech giant’s operational systems and rich user base, it needs to be built using Apple’s own tools and programming language. iPhone’s iMessage is definitely worth this hassle. It has proven to be a big hit since its release in 2016. Within the first six months, iMessage has generated thousands of innovative in-messenger extensions including those created by AirbnbandDropbox. Late in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg admitted this feature is one of Facebook’s ‘biggest competitor by far.’ Since the release of Lisk Mobile during Lisk’s Berlin meetup in October 2018, our team has been busy implementing features such as Face ID Authentication, as well as developing blockchain-specific solutions. Identifying the opportunity to extend the iMessage option for our users, we got to work on our own integration.

The iMessage extension was included in Lisk Mobile 0.10.0, which was released in February 2019. Our users can now request and send LSK tokens straight from the iOS-based messenger without opening our app. However, the journey to implement this feature wasn’t straightforward — Lisk Mobile is written in JavaScript using React Native, while iMessage requires development in native iOS. During our research, we have found there is just a handful of resources available to help with using React Native to build iOS extensions available out there. There was no clear way to proceed. After thorough deliberation, we have decided to try a different approach by building our own bridge implementation. We found it a very educational and motivational journey for our team to develop the feature in this way. We will show you how by breaking the solution down into native and React Native parts and describing how to bind these separated parts together.

Table of contents:

1. The Problem
2. The Solution
3. Creating a React Native Project
4. Adding an iMessage Extension Target
5. Creating an iMessage Root on the React Native Side
6. Connecting the iMessage Component with the Native Side
7. Creating Bridge Modules
8. Consuming Native Modules on React Native
9. Extras
10. Final Thoughts

If you want to know more about Lisk first, check out this short explainer clip, our product page, or our documentation!

The problem: there was no up-to-date documentation to create an iMessage extension using React Native.

Before we dive deep into the solution, let’s first set out the actual challenge. We used React Native in order to stay aligned with the programming language of the entire Lisk platform. We have been developing our mobile blockchain wallet since April 2018. This means we already have visual components and business logic enhanced by utility functions for cryptographic operations and communicating with the API of Lisk Core, which is a platform containing all information necessary to interact with our blockchain, including security, consensus algorithm and much more. The communication is provided by Lisk Elements, our modular JavaScript library.

The first option was to look for existing React Native component and educational material. Unfortunately, we could not find official documentation or up-to-date resources due to the fast pace of change in both React Native and native iOS development.

The second option was to try native iOS development within the Lisk Mobile codebase. The benefit of this approach was example projects and conference talks provided by Apple. However, introducing a considerable amount of Swift or Objective-C into the codebase was not desirable. Such a move, would cause too much code duplication due to us having to rewrite most of our existing business logic and UI components.

The solution: we wrote our own bridge implementation and documented the process.

After careful evaluation, we decided to take an alternative route: writing our own bridge implementation. In the rest of this article, we will explain how we did it. If you want to jump straight into code, we’ve also created this handy demo project on GitHub

Create a React Native Project

First things first! Let’s start by creating a brand new React Native application. Since we are going to use native features, it would be better to follow the related part of the official documentation that suggests using the react-native-cli.

If you don’t have it installed, you can do it by running

1$ npm install -g react-native-cli

Then let’s create a new project called, of course, AwesomeProject!

1$ react-native init AwesomeProject

Add an iMessage Extension Target

The next step is to add a target for our Xcode project that covers the iMessage extension.

Create an iMessage Root on the React Native Side

Now that we have our Xcode target for the iMessage extension, it’s time to create a blueprint for our root component on the React Native side.

We also need to register that component in order to access it easily in the following steps. Let’s create another file in the project root similar to the one React Native creates for the main application.

Connecting iMessage Component with the Native Side

At this step, we will update our iMessage target to have the capability of rendering a React Native application within a native one. In order to achieve this, we have some manual work to do. In a regular React Native application, this step is actually handled automatically by the boilerplate that we have from react-native-cli, this is the case for Lisk. If you feel something is missing, you can compare the configuration and structure of your iMessage extension target with the main application.

Linking Libraries

We will start the configuration by linking the React related libraries. Since it’s meant to be a simple application, libraries we add are just the core ones we need at the moment. If you are using some third party modules on your main application and also need them in your iMessage Extension, don’t forget to link them here as well!

Creating a Bridge Header file for Swift

Now that we have made those libraries available for our native part, it’s time to create a Bridging-Header file make them recognizable for the Swift compiler. The reason behind this is the libraries we have linked on the previous step are written with Objective-C. This has been a common approach since Apple introduced Swift as the new language of the iOS platform and you can obtain deeper knowledge about it here.

We start with creating a new header file called Bridging-Header.h inside AwesomeProjectMessageExtension folder.

Next, by navigating to Build Settings / Swift Compiler — General section of the Xcode configuration, choose that file as the Objective-C bridging header.

Updating Project and Build Configuration

The first one is updating Info.plist, a configuration file placed in every iOS project. In order to make our React Native bundle accessible in development mode, we need to enable loading content from localhost.

The next step is to add a Build Phase for iMessage extensions target in order to make sure we trigger the build script of React Native when we are running the extension.

The last step for this section is to update the schemes of the project. Each target in the application has a scheme that defines the configuration for actions available within the context of Xcode like Build, Run and Analyze.

We update the schemes of both the main application and iMessage extension to make sure we have all the required content while preparing the app for the release.

RCTBridge and the Initial Render

Now that we are pretty much done with the configuration, it’s time to start building our structure to render the application we have registered in theCreate iMessage Root on React Native Side section.

First, let’s take a quick look at the structure of the iMessage extension. Every iMessage Extension has an entry point called MSMessagesAppViewControllerwhich extends the UIViewController class from UIKit and contains lifecycle methods and properties of an iMessage extension instance. This is similar to the AppDelegate in our main iOS application but doesn’t have all the capabilities of it.

What we focus on at this point is to find a suitable way to create our RCTRootView (an UIView subclass exposed by React Native that can be embedded in any part of a native application) and load our iMessage related code on the React Native side as the bundle.

First, we start with modifying our MessagesViewController.swift to create an RCTBridge, RCTRootView and render our registered AwesomeProjectMessageExtension module within that view.

Since we want to clear out everything in the screen before and after opening the iMessage extension, we also create a little helper module that does the trick for us!

Creating Bridge Modules

In this section, we are going to create our helpers and modules on the Swift side in order to expose the required methods and events to communicate with the React Native side.

Creating a Mapper for Swift — JS Communication

Since we are going to send data from Swift to the React Native, it would be nice to create a mapper utility for formatting that data properly.

Creating a Manager for MessagesViewController

Now we are going to create a module named MessagesManager that has a connection with our main MessagesViewController and will help us to interact with from the React Native side.

Based on the guidance from the official documentation we will need access to activeConversion object and presentation style as well as the methods will allow us to modify them.

Since we are creating that custom class with Swift, we also need to provide the interface file to make sure it’s recognized as a native module by React Native.

Creating an EventEmitter for MessagesViewController

In addition to the helper methods we have provided in the previous section, now we will create another class by following the EventEmitter guide from official React Native documentation.

MessagesEventEmitter will help us to keep the JavaScript side informed when there’s a change in the iMessage context. Those changes may be applied as a result of an interaction made by the user (like updating presentation style, selecting a message in a conversation) or receiving a new message from one of the remote participants.

First of all, we update our MessagesViewController to define a protocol that can be easily implemented by MessagesEventEmitter to reduce the effort we need to make (and encourage separation of concerns) in order to follow an event-based design pattern.

Custom Module Initializer

If you create a native module with React Native by following the basic flow, you’ll end up with a pre-instantiated object that is created during the initialization step of the bridge. If it was a regular iOS application, we would have a chance to communicate with the root view controller by usingUIApplication’s shared property but that’s not what we were exactly looking for.

Considering that our Native Module needs to be stateful to communicate with the MessagesAppViewController instance, we ended up creating a custom module initializer by following an approach derived from the the dependency injection guide on React Native documentation.

Then we will update the presentReactNative method of MessagesViewController to use that custom module initializer.

Consuming Native Modules on React Native

Now that we have covered pretty much all the things we need from our native modules, we can start playing with them on the React Native side.

Updating Presentation Style

So far so good huh? But we forgot something. Let’s look at the recording below and try to catch what’s missing.

Since we are not listening to the events related to the presentation style changes triggered by the native UI, we end up in a loop with the sheet continually opening, we don’t have the correct value of presentationStyle right after it’s been updated. In order to resolve this, we are going to use the MessagesEventEmitter module.

This will allow the sheet to receive updates on state from both the native Swift environment (for when users manually close the sheet) and from within our React Native app.

Now the app responds to both triggers from the codebase, and users manually close or open the sheet.

Composing a Message

Now we are so close to our main goal, composing an iMessage from the React Native side!

Let’s start with initializing our blueprint to create the data of a message object that we can through our MessagesManager module.

Now that we are able to compose and send a message, we create a very simple example to demonstrate the usage of url field.

What we are going to do is to put a timestamp and the identifier of sender to the url field and present it on the screen. We will also make use of the getActiveConversation method exposed by MessagesManager as well as the didReceiveMessage and didSelectMessage events from the MessagesEvents module.

Now if we send a message as Kate to John (or vica-versa) we can observe the change in the timestamps and the sender IDs.

If you want to share more data and handle complex logic, our recommendation is to use a third party library for simplifying the URL construction and parsing logic. For a better example, you can check out the iMessage part of our open source Lisk Mobile application.