SDK’s for mobile? Is there a market?

Much as I want everything to be native within the browser. Chrome, today, doesn’t really allow for persistent windows or to remotely wake-up a page. I’m left wondering why push notifications aren’t available for my laptop. But I digress and shall save these for a future article. The topic today is simply SDK’s.

Recognizing that IOS will likely be with us for a while and the limitations stated about, if you’re developing a mobile application and want to use WebRTC, you’ll obviously have to embed a WebRTC library into your code base (even with Android). The starting point for that is to utilize the open source code that Google has provided. Unfortunately, this source code is shall we say a tad rustic as Vonage found in their development. Yeah you can get it to work, but you’ll be beating it and bending metal to get it into shape.

Scanning the WebRTC marketplace, it’s not clear to me anyone is trying to sell this basic engine part (or at least companies are doing a really good job masking that they have this).  I do see mobile SDK’s that seem tightly coupled with various service offerings which really doesn’t answer my question. Thus I sit and listen to developers tell me how they’re just going to build it themselves. This sounds like time, money and error to me.

The opportunity is perhaps too small to justify effort but lacking such I fear is going to slow roll many applications as developers spend time on things no application related. The same question applies as Google’s Chrome Frame plug-in expires and I hear a similar discussion (“we’ll go build a new plug-in ourselves”). I’ m hoping for a better solution.