[saarons]

This would be great in the Android world. There are dozens of SMS/XMPP chat apps that all take a slightly different approach to chat interfaces. Some have implemented material design makeovers, but there still seems to be slight differences amongst the ones that have. Something like this for Android would go a long way to help the apps that still haven't made the transition.

[blakewatters]

Hey saarons -- Blake from Layer here. This is a big challenge that we are actively discussing internally. With Atlas on iOS, we had the luxury of a gold standard reference UI thanks the ubiquity of iMessage. On Android, as you so aptly point out, there isn't such an (even de-facto) standard user interface to reference. We're experimenting with a number of approaches and user interface idioms and would love to discuss it with you in depth. If you're open to collaborating, hit us up on [e-mail] and we can grab a call.