Keeping It Realtime

The original SimpleWebRTC was one of the first Javascript libraries for WebRTC out there; the first public version was released more than five years ago. It offered a simple API that allowed JavaScript developers to prototype stuff quickly without having to understand the intricacies of the WebRTC APIs. “You can build cool stuff with WebRTC in five minutes” was true. Taking it to production at scale remains a bit more difficult.

Under the hood, SimpleWebRTC consisted of a bunch of Javascript modules that let you access the camera, microphone, screen content, a wrapper for the RTCPeerConnection API, and something to keep track of your peers and do all of the signaling. It came with a very simple NodeJS signaling server called signalmaster. Socket.io was used for signaling.

This simplicity came at a cost. SimpleWebRTC was designed for a single use-case: multiparty video chat using direct peer-to-peer connection between the participants. For the more complex problems we had to solve, we needed something better. Which is why we rewrote SimpleWebRTC almost from scratch, taking into account what we had learned in the last five years.

Hey guess what? Today is SimpleWebRTC beta release day! We know how difficult using WebRTC can be, so we decided to make it simple (see the play on words there?).

SimpleWebRTC allows you to add video, voice, text chat, and screen-sharing to your app with easy to use React components. And as of today, you can try it out for free.

Very soon we’ll be shipping a brand new version of SimpleWebRTC, and everything about it is different.

What’s different?

The biggest feature of the soon-to-be-released version of SimpleWebRTC is that it will just be a bunch of flexible React components.

These components will make it so that anyone with a basic understanding of React can build advanced WebRTC applications. No need to understand anything about how connections are set up, no need to set up signaling or STUN/TURN servers, and it gets even better than that.

To the thousands of people who made Talky calls on February 14, 2017, Talky didn’t seem much different. There were some icon and button color changes, but nothing to write home about. However, it was a very big day in our world.

For the past couple of years, we've been transitioning Talky from AmpersandJS to React. The reason for the transition is an article on its own, but to put it simply, I only need one word. Components, heard of 'em?

During the rewrite, we moved the core functionality of Talky into its own library of super slick React components which... [SPOILER ALERT] we'll very soon be making available to anyone who wants to build an app using them. This very simple webrtc react library enables us to build robust video chat features in very little time at all, and we're excited to say we'll be sharing it with the world in the coming months. 🎉

While Talky on the web was receiving consistent upgrades, our Talky iOS application hadn't been updated in quite some time, and it really needed an overhaul to take advantage of some backend upgrades. When trying to figure out what to do about our iOS application we had two options:

Open road

I began my adventure working at &yet in January of 2018, and one of my first experiences was when suddenly, traffic on Talky plummeted. This was particularly jarring to me since one of the reasons I was hired was to be Talky’s product manager. How could traffic drop so quickly, and why didn’t it recover?

Initially, this felt like a fluke. Perhaps there was an issue with our usage monitoring, or maybe not all of our traffic was being reported? Because we don't gather data from our users, we didn't have regional information at our fingertips. Luckily, our support emails began coming in and we were able to diagnose the issue. All of the missing traffic had been coming from one particular country, The United Arab Emirates (UAE), and their government had banned our app.

Let’s Talky ‘bout UAE