Web developer from Layer here, glad you enjoyed it! It was the perfect fit and typer made it simple to implement. Thank you to the LayerVault team!

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 hello@layer.com and we can grab a call.

Hey - Blake from Layer here. We're big fans of JSQMessagesViewController and a number of our early access developers built their UIs on top of it. The biggest difference between Atlas and JSQMessagesViewController at the moment is that Atlas is deeply integrated with the messaging services of Layer and the programming model exposed by LayerKit, while JSQMessagesViewController is backend agnostic. This translates directly into the amount of code that you need to write in order to get your UI and messaging fully wired. It's a trade-off -- with Atlas you write less code and have less things to coordinate within your UI, but you pick up a direct dependency on Layer. At this point there's a fair bit of overlap in functionality between Atlas and JSQMessagesViewController, but keep in mind that this is our 1.0 release. Looking a few months down the line, we'll be bringing a number of additional components and services online that will make the distinctions more apparent. We're also in the process of developing Atlas for Android and Web, which will share a similar API aesthetic. Hope this is helpful and you can find the time to give Atlas a whirl!

Hey ckluis -- Stevie from Layer here. We will be publishing our public pricing page in the next few days to answer just this question in detail! We offer a free Sandbox plan to use for development and beta testing that supports up to 1,000 monthly active users.

As for production plans, we offer unlimited messaging and charge by Monthly Active Users (but only users who send or receive messages). Our production plans start at $99/month, though we will be rolling out some offerings for pre-funding startups in th near future. With Layer, you can get unlimited messaging for a MAU for the month for less than the cost of sending a single SMS.

We aim to offer a comprehensive platform and service at roughly the cost of operating your own infrastructure while saving you the cost of development.

All the pricing detail can be found inside our dashboard today for those with accounts, and on our public page soon.

You can reach us at growth at layer for more info.