We’re happy to announce that we have a new managing partner on board – Rami Wazni. With over two decades of experience in the software development industry, Wazni will be responsible for overseeing Appstronauts’ North American division and helping to increase our presence in the region.
With geolocation, you offer extra value to your app’s users and increase the competitive advantage. And it’s super easy to implement with Ionic. Discover what are the benefits and how to do it.
WebRTC allows you to create an app that enables real-time communication between peers. Combining it with Ionic, you can quickly develop two cross-platform apps with access to the device’s features. Find out what you need to know about WebRTC and Ionic combination.
WebRTC is a technology that enables real-time communication on the web. The technology allows to easily stream compressed voice, video or data on the web directly between devices without the need of using browser plugins.
With WebRTC, you can build, for example, video or audio communications apps, live customer support apps, group video chats, and apps to share confidential files, among others. WebRTC is used in many well-known apps like, for example, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. It’s available on desktop and mobile, for Google Chrome, Safari (11 and superior), Firefox and Opera.
What is more, WebRTC provides fast and secure data exchange. End-to-end encryption between the peers guarantees high security of transmitted data. Therefore, the solution is also perfect for enterprises. WebRTC allows creating a peer-to-peer chatting app that will work without access to the internet. There’s also no need to use plugins or install additional software, so the user experience is excellent.
WebRTC consists of a few APIs and protocols. Working together, they provide secure browser-based apps for real-time peer-to-peer communication. They are written with HTML5 code. To obtain and communicate streaming data, WebRTC uses following APIs:
RTCPeerConnection allows communicating the streaming between peers. Although to control the process of signaling (coordinating communication, sending control messages) it needs an additional mechanism. Developers need to choose an appropriate two-way communication channel, like SIP or XMPP.
WebRTC can be used with both native and cross-platform apps. In most cases, the user won’t notice the difference, and cross-platform apps can be developed a lot faster. There may be a little gap in performance in case of heavy apps or games, but it doesn’t apply to real-time communication apps.
Although to access the device’s features and make the app look and act like a native one, we need to use additional tools. By choosing them wisely, we can make the development process easier and create our apps with the use of web technologies.
One of the best tools is Cordova. To clarify, Apache Cordova is a set of device’s APIs that enables access to native features, like for example camera, using JavaScript. Although to build User Interface like in a native app, we need to combine Cordova with a UI framework, like Ionic.
Ionic is a UI framework that allows building cross-platform apps using well-known web technologies. It provides tools to build a mobile app with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. Using Ionic, you can only write one code and then easily adapt it to each platform. As a result, you obtain two native-like apps for Android and iOS.
The framework offers a rich set of elements and icons that look and feel exactly like native ones. The newest Ionic 4 is also framework agnostic. Therefore, we can create our app with Angular, React, Preact or Vue, and even with no framework at all. What is more, Ionic is built on the top of Cordova, so the access to native device’s features is smooth and comfortable.
WebRTC allows us to create a real-time communication app with the highest security level, excellent sound quality, effective and not interrupted streaming. With the right tools, like RxJS library and XState library, the code maintains clean, and the app is predictable. The ICE technique allows obtaining the fastest possible connection between peers. WebRTC is the most convenient technology for creating real-time communication apps.
On the other hand, Cordova provides easy access to native device’s features, which is essential in that kind of apps, and the Ionic Framework serves to build native-like UI. Since Ionic is built on the top of Cordova, with that one framework, we can manage both things. The development is faster and more comfortable, and we obtain real-time communication apps for Android and iOS with just one code.
WebRTC and Ionic are excellent tools to create mobile apps for real-time communication. At Appstronauts, we have experience in creating WebRTC apps, and we will gladly share it with you! Kindly send us a message at hello@appstronauts.co with a short description of your project. Our developers are ready to help.
Enter Appium, an open-source automation framework that has revolutionized the way mobile app testing is conducted. By leveraging the power of Appium’s capabilities, developers can now automate end-to-end tests for Ionic apps, enabling them to detect and address potential issues early on in the development cycle.
We’re happy to announce that we have a new managing partner on board – Rami Wazni. With over two decades of experience in the software development industry, Wazni will be responsible for overseeing Appstronauts’ North American division and helping to increase our presence in the region.
Creating native mobile apps for multiple platforms is an expensive process, which also requires a lot of time and competencies.