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The Hardest Feature We Didn't Ship: Engineering the Chat "Lift Effect" in React Native
In mobile app development, sometimes the smallest interactions are the hardest to get right.We recently spent a significant amount of engineering time building a "Lift Effect" for our AI chat interface—similar to what you see in the ChatGPT iOS app. The idea is simple: when you send a message, instead of your message just appearing at the bottom, the entire chat "lifts" up to the top of the screen, creating a blank space below. As the AI streams its response, that blank space is filled, keeping your query perfectly positioned at the top.It sounds like a nice-to-have. But getting it to work smoothly in React Native, at 60fps, without shakes or race conditions, turned out to be our "Final Boss" of chat UI challenges.
