Rich chat media UX

Users touch the media controls dozens of times a day: recording a voice note, editing a photo before they send it, picking an emoji mid-sentence. Off-the-shelf Flutter packages cover most of that and then fall down where a messenger can’t afford it, like a recorder that drops frames on a cheap Android or a picker that behaves one way on iOS and another on Android.

I own that layer and maintain chat-tuned versions of the media stack, so these controls behave the same on every platform we ship to.

• Voice messages: a waveform renders while you record, the feedback people expect from any modern messenger, at a frame budget that holds on low-end hardware.
• In-chat image editing: a frosted-glass editor for a quick crop, drawing or caption before sending, styled to the app instead of to the library’s defaults.
• Emoji input: reworked for the composer, where the picker shares the screen with a live keyboard and an open conversation.
• Camera and gallery selection: one selection flow across iOS and Android, matching what users already know from other messengers instead of exposing each platform’s quirks.

Rough edges here are the ones users find first.