WebRTC cordova plugin in ionic 3 angular 4

Question

I have worked on a video conferencing hybrid app back when ionic 2 was still in beta. I developed it in ionic 1 with a few tweaks to make it work. Working now with ionic 3 and angular 4, I am struggling to find an officially supported WebRTC cordova plugin for my ionic app. Does anyone have an idea if the plugin would be officially supported soon? If not , what are the best options to use? Thanks guys!

Answer 1

On Android, WebRTC is supported since Webview v36 (Android 5 Lollipop and higher). See this document for more information.

This site provides data about the relative number of devices running a given version of the Android platform.

As you can see, you need to support a lot of different Android versions. I would advise you to use Crosswalk as an plugin for Cordova. Crosswalk bundles the app with an up-to-date Chrome webview that replaces the default Chrome webview of the Android device. So every Android device running the app have the exact same webview. This way old Android device can work with WebRTC, no more css fixes for older Chrome versions and no more performance problems. The downside is that Crosswalk & Cordova installed adds 58 MB of disk space. Cordova without Crosswalk adds 1,9 MB of disk space.

Using Crosswalk is very simple, just one line of code:

cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview

WebRTC is supported since iOS 11. In october 2017 iOS 11 had a worldwide share of 41,99% according to statcounter.com. If you visit the website you can also see the stats of your country.

So for iOS you definitely need a cordova plugin. I know two options: iosrtc and phonertc