Progressive Web Apps and WebRTC

Four years ago, I came off stage from a London WebRTC industry event seething. I was upset, I felt none of the WebRTC events were helping anyone really learn how to use this emerging technology. I sputtered around backstage venting at anyone who came near. What the developer needed, I felt, was an event entertaining, interesting and informative. A focus on making it easier, not harder.

Chuckling in a corner was Serge LaChapelle, then Product Manager for WebRTC at Google. Speaking in his typical low, calm and pragmatic voice, he said “I agree, if you want to put on a better event, I’ll sponsor it.” Standing near by was Tsahi Levent-Levi (bloggeek.me) who made the mistake of nodding in agreement. The Kranky Geek WebRTC event was borne.

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[ecko_pull_quote alignment=”left” source=””]Kranky Geek sf this year will focus solely on mobile real time communications.[/ecko_pull_quote]This coming Friday, November 18, 2016 at Google San Francisco, we will hold our 4th Kranky Geek event and you’re welcome to register and attend at www.krankygeek.com. Each year has been a solid event and we tweak to reflect the changing landscape. A follow-on event in Sao Paulo Brazil is scheduled for November 22nd. In addition to sponsorship by Google, I thank return sponsors Tokbox and Twilio as well as new this year Vidyo, Callstats.io and WebRTC.Ventures.

Google held their Chrome Development Summit this week. An excellent event and you should watch the video replays.  The over arching theme for the event was mobile and progressive web apps. Speakers presented compelling evidence, the world is going mobile (some places will be mobile only) and the days of downloading applications may be nearing an end.

Developing on mobile has never been super easy and has created a sub-section of the developer world. Mobile development spawned frameworks and vendor offerings to try and make application building easier. With progressive web apps, Google will enable a much larger percentage of developers to be effective in the mobile world. Plus, like with WebRTC, you don’t have to buy into some passing framework or development tool.

WebRTC on mobile, or creating any communications application on mobile has only been for the heroic. It’s been hard. Yes, some have climbed the mountain. But all had scars to show for their work. The reality is that rolling your own WebRTC mobile library made for a fair amount of work.

As Google makes progress with morphing Chrome/Android into an application platform, WebRTC is automatically included in this. The result, it should be much easier to develop or incorporate audio/video communications into your mobile application.