Ethora 26.07: Deep Theming, Message Search, Durable Reactions

Every Ethora release is numbered by year and month. 26.07 is the release we cut at the start of July 2026, containing everything the team built in June. Where 26.06 was about putting an AI agent inside every app, 26.07 is about control and reliability: making the chat surface look exactly like your product, letting your users find anything they have said, and making calls and reactions behave the way people expect. Here is what is new, why it matters, and where to go deeper.

Make the chat look like your product, not ours

The biggest theme of this cycle is theming. Host apps can now drive the look of the chat from a single config file, on web and React Native alike:

• Colours from config. Message bubble backgrounds for your own and other people’s messages, the input bar, icon colours, sender-name and avatar colours, and the message-date colour are all configurable. Accent icon-buttons like the active send button and the new-chat button follow your colour config too, and icon colours are now locked against stray CSS from the host page so they render the way you set them.
• Typography and fonts. You can configure typography, input layout, and header height, and ship your own custom fonts through the chat surface. On React Native there is a dedicated useChatFonts hook for this.
• Android broadcasts that read cleanly. System broadcast messages now render as a centered banner instead of blending into the conversation.

If you are embedding chat into an existing product, this is the difference between “a chat widget” and “our chat”. Start on the chat SDK page, or the React Native chat SDK and Android chat SDK pages for the platform specifics.

Your users can search their own messages

Message search was available on frontend only. Server-side message search used to be something only available as a customization for enterprise customers. In 26.07 it is a first-class capability for end users: an app’s own users can search their message history through the API, and results are sortable with an explicit direction. Combined with the server-side archive, that means a searchable, durable record of every conversation, which matters most in regulated settings where you have to be able to find what was said.

Video calls beta

Video and audio calls are now available in beta version for all Ethora.com multi-tenant server users. It is an optional opt-in configuration for our enterprise customers who use a self-hosted / private chat server (meaning this will only be enabled for your end users if you update to 2607 and enable it in deploy configuration).

Audio calls, and reactions that survive a refresh

Two smaller features that users notice immediately:

• Opt-in audio-only calls now sit next to the existing video call button on the web component. They are off by default and switch on with a single config flag.
• Durable message reactions. Reactions are now stored as part of chat history and reapplied to their messages when a room reloads, so they no longer disappear on a page refresh.

A reliability pass on the web chat component

June closed with a focused round of fixes on the web chat component that add up to a noticeably calmer experience:

• In-app notifications no longer fire for your own messages, or for the room you are already looking at.
• QR-join is reliable outside production. The QR code now encodes the room correctly and builds its link from your configured URL or the current origin instead of a hardcoded default, so a code generated on a staging or self-hosted environment actually works.
• Deleting a room now leaves it cleanly, so a public room no longer silently rejoins itself.
• Two crash paths were closed, and host-configuration switches that were previously ignored (hiding the new-chat button, hiding duplicate profile menu items) now take effect.

The web component lives on the React.js chat SDK page and in the Ethora Chat Component GitHub repository.

Durable server-side archiving

Behind the scenes, a message-tracking archive hook is now built directly into the chat-server image and wired through deployment. Message activity is durably recorded on the server, which is the foundation the search and history features above rely on. For teams running Ethora themselves, self-hosted chat server on AWS walks through the deployment.

Admin: back up and move any app or agent

The admin app gained real data portability this cycle. You can archive and restore users, apps, and agents, and export or import an app or agent’s full configuration as JSON or ZIP. That makes it straightforward to back up a configuration, clone it, or move it between a staging and a production server.

Why the year.month versioning?

Ethora releases follow a simple calendar scheme: version YY.MM ships at the start of month MM with everything developed the month before. 26.07 is the July 2026 release built during June. It keeps self-hosted customers on a predictable upgrade rhythm and makes it obvious how current any deployment is. The full week-by-week changelog, with links to every commit, lives in RELEASE-NOTES.md on GitHub.

Try it

The fastest way to see 26.07 is to create a free app on Ethora, theme the chat to match your brand from the config file, and try an audio call. If you are weighing a self-hosted deployment for compliance reasons, start with self-hosted chat server on AWS or book a call and we will walk you through it.