---
title: "Building a ChatGPT-Style AI Chat App in React Native with RAG & Streaming"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-chatgpt-style-ai-chat-app-in-react-native-with-rag-streaming-b0jyy2ybj
source_url: https://margelo.com/blog/building-native-llm-chat-app-with-rag
type: article
source: "Nitro Modules"
published: 2026-08-23T12:23:31.996Z
updated: 2026-08-23T12:55:45.078Z
tags: ["webdev", "openai", "react-native", "rag"]
reading_time: 22
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Building a ChatGPT-Style AI Chat App in React Native with RAG & Streaming

**[Nitro Modules](https://daily.dev/sources/margelo)** · 22 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A detailed walkthrough builds a ChatGPT-style AI chat app in React Native, showing how to achieve a native feel using Callstack's Liquid Glass component, react-native-keyboard-controller for keyboard-synced animations, Reanimated for UI-thread animations, and Skia for a shimmering 'thinking' text effect. It covers streaming replies via OpenAI's Responses API over a native WebSocket (react-native-nitro-websockets) rather than HTTP, implementing RAG with Pinecone as a function-calling tool, natively rendering markdown with react-native-enriched-markdown, and performance techniques like socket prewarming, native fetch, and profiling in release builds. The source code is open source on GitHub.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://margelo.com/blog/building-native-llm-chat-app-with-rag>

## Questions this post answers

### Why would you use a WebSocket instead of HTTP streaming for OpenAI's Responses API in a tool-calling chat app?

A WebSocket keeps one persistent connection to /v1/responses and continues a tool-calling turn by sending only new items plus a previous_response_id, avoiding resending the growing context on every HTTP request. This matters when the model calls tools mid-turn, since each round trip over HTTP would otherwise require a fresh request. OpenAI reports up to roughly 40% faster end-to-end performance for rollouts with 20 or more tool calls.

_Developers weighing streaming transports for AI chat features can track these tradeoffs on daily.dev._

### How can you make a React Native WebSocket connection start faster on cold app launch?

react-native-nitro-websockets exposes a prewarmOnAppStart function that queues the connection intent so native code begins the TCP and TLS handshake on a background thread before the JS bundle finishes loading, then the later NitroWebSocket constructor adopts that warm connection instead of opening a new one. Measured gains were roughly 150ms on an iPhone 16 and 250ms on a Samsung Galaxy S22.

_Teams optimizing mobile app cold-start latency can follow techniques like this via daily.dev._

### How do you make a UIKit Liquid Glass effect gracefully degrade on Android or older iOS in React Native?

Use @callstack/liquid-glass's isLiquidGlassSupported boolean, which is a real UIKit capability check on iOS 26+ and hard-coded false everywhere else, then branch: render LiquidGlassView when true, or a plain View with a fallback tint color and the same layout when false, so nothing shifts visually between platforms.

_React Native developers targeting iOS 26 glass effects can dig deeper into implementation patterns on daily.dev._

## Similar posts on daily.dev

- [Building ChatGPT Apps with Free React Components](https://daily.dev/posts/building-chatgpt-apps-with-free-react-components-t66tigrtz) · Telerik · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

---

Tags: [#webdev](https://daily.dev/tags/webdev), [#openai](https://daily.dev/tags/openai), [#react-native](https://daily.dev/tags/react-native), [#rag](https://daily.dev/tags/rag)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-chatgpt-style-ai-chat-app-in-react-native-with-rag-streaming-b0jyy2ybj)