RTC@Scale 2024 – an event summary
RTC@Scale is Facebook’s virtual WebRTC event, covering current and future topics. Here’s the summary for RTC@Scale 2024 so you can pick and choose the relevant ones for you.
Read MoreWhile you need to give direct access to your APIs, an SDK is a critical piece of your offering.
There was an article on the ProgrammableWeb on Sending.io NOT offering an SDK for their service. I think in most cases, this approach is wrong.
Sending.io decided to offer only an API layer for its customers. You can access their REST APIs, but how you do it is your problem - even when what they give is designed and built for mobile devices.
I'll start with a quick explanation of the two - at least in the scope of this post. There will be those who will definitely object my definitions here, but the idea is just to make the distinction I need here - and not to pontificate the meaning of the two.
Back to Sending.io and their reasons - from this article:
While this may work in the gaming industry, I think it is not workable in many other industries. Here are my thoughts on this one:
There are two ways to treat an SDK - as part of your offering or as an afterthought.
If you treat it as an afterthought, then performance issues, crashes and privacy issues will crop more frequently than not.
With most SDKs today built as frontends to a backend REST API, it makes perfect sense that some of them just aren't written well: Backend developers are good at scaling a service to run in the cloud. For them, considerations of memory and performance of the single session in the same way that a native Android developer thinks about is foreign.
If you really want to offer an SDK, have a pro build it for you.
See also the article on Video Call API.
Assuming what you have on offer is a closed binary SDK that the customer ends up using, then control may be an issue.
It doesn't have to be this way.
There are 3 options you can take here, each with its own control points for customers:
There are several reasons that make an SDK so powerful:
Plan on offering a backend API for your customers?
You shouldn't just ignore an SDK - especially not if you plan on having developers integrate with your APIs inside mobile apps.
Need to understand WebRTC and how to design and architect real world solutions with it? A first step is to understand the servers used to connect WebRTC.
RTC@Scale is Facebook’s virtual WebRTC event, covering current and future topics. Here’s the summary for RTC@Scale 2024 so you can pick and choose the relevant ones for you.
Read MoreNeed WebRTC recording in your application? Check out the various requirements and architectural decisions you’ll have to make when implementing it.
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