Today, as part of our SaaS plans, we are making our iOS, Android and Web SDKs available to software makers for distribution under your own brand.

This offer coincides with general availability of new major versions for each of our SDK's. This performance focussed release has been developed specifically with the high performance and scalability needs of leading software companies in mind: Web Messenger 4.0, Android SDK 5.0 and iOS SDK 6.0. This new breed of SDKs are powered by a set of optimized backend APIs that we have progressively deployed to production over the last few weeks.

SDKs for Distribution

Offering our SDKs as an OEM component completes the puzzle for software makers who need to offers the full gamut of messaging channels that the businesses they power need to engage with a diversified customer base.

This new capability allows you to distribute web and in-app messaging SDKs under your own brand to your customers, so that you can build software that provides access to these channels using our API.'

Our private-label offering equips you with ready-to-distribute builds of our SDKs that are rebranded at the code level to cover the full SDK API. For example, instead of Smooch.init() your SDK will be initialized with YourBrand.init(). This way Smooch lies truly under the hood.

With the package, you also receive documentation covering everything you need to know about distributing an iOS, Android and Web SDK for your customers and details on what they need to integrate into their apps and websites.

If you opt for our Enterprise plan, you’ll also get access to the full source code of the 3 SDKs via your own private Github repository.

Performance, Performance, Performance

We’ve focused this new major iteration of our SDKs on these ‘under the hood’ changes. The core of all 3 SDKs has been refactored using a new, highly optimized initialization sequence. We have fully redesigned how each SDK interacts with the Smooch platform and when key events like creating an appUser or establishing a WebSocket connection should be happening.

These optimizations result in a faster SDK initialization. For example, compared to the Smooch iOS SDK 5.x, our init sequence on 6.0 is twice as fast!

Overall, these deep changes deliver significantly reduced usage of the CPU and networking resources, - ultimately resulting in better battery life for the end-user. On the backend side, it sets our platform in a growth and scalability path upon which we can build for many years to come.

Other Improvements in Web messenger 4.0

Web messenger is also getting its own set of improvements with this release. The biggest change is that Web messenger now renders itself in a <iframe>. This delivers the following key benefits:

• Web messenger gets its own JavaScript runtime, making it compatible with 100% of web sites and Javascript frameworks (and we know there’s more than quite a few 😝 )
• Web messenger gets its own CSS context, making head scratching styling bugs nonexistent.

Following our performance focus for this release, we have also changed how Web Messenger is loaded into a website: now it’s asynchronous. This will significantly improve your website load time when including Smooch and lead to an overall snappier experience.

Upgrading

The new SDKs include a few API changes mainly around the way you initialize them. To upgrade to the latest version follow our instructions for each of the SDKs : Web Messenger 4.0, Android SDK 5.0 and iOS SDK 6.0.

If you are just starting, the Smooch dashboard will point you to use the latest versions.

What’s next

This new SDK release set us on a great trajectory for the future. You can look forward to us constantly improving and making our SDKs more powerful. We are already working on adding more rich capabilities to make it easy for you to deliver new types of messaging experiences.