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Introduction

In these tutorials we will learn step by step how to create a videoconference application. We will start by the basics and end with some advance features such as screen sharing.

We can divide the SDKs into two types that will depend on the device we want to support:

  • Web SDK (PexRTC): This will be the SDK to choose if we want to implement a videoconference in a web application. It's a JavaScript library that will run in any desktop or mobile browser.

  • Mobile SDKs: These will be the SDKs to use in case we want to integrate a videoconference inside a native app. Apart of using the native language (Kotlin on Android and Swift on iOS), we would have some additional features in comparison with the Web SDK:

    • Better performance: We will use the hardware directly without the browser layer. This will give us an extra performance.
    • Faster adaptation to connectivity changes: These SDKs use their own media stack instead of WebRTC. Thanks to this it adapts faster in case of a connectivity degradation.
    • Share screen: The browser APIs have an important limitation in this sense. They can receive the screen sharing from other participants, but it's not possible to share the screen from a mobile. This can be solved if we use the Mobile SDKs.
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Using the Web SDK for building a mobile application is a valid concept. We can create the videoconference inside a Webview and create there the conference.

However, we have to keep in mind that we will loose some of the features that the mobile SDKs provide. A special case is if the user is using iOS. In this situation the system will request access to the microphone and camera every time he joins a conference.