Developing WebRTC-based team apps with a cross-platform mobile framework

Abstract

We present lessons learned in developing cross platform multi-party team applications. Our apps include a range of communication and collaboration scenarios: document and content sharing in a team space, an agent-based meeting helper, phone number dialer via a voice-over-IP (VoIP) gateway, and multi-party call in peer-to-peer or client-server mode. We use web real-time communication (WebRTC) to enable the audio and video media paths in the apps. We use frameworks such as Chrome Apps and Apache Cordova to create apps that can be accessed from a browser, or installed on a desktop, mobile device, or wearable. The challenges and techniques described in our paper related to audio, video, network, power conservation and security are important to other developers building cross-platform apps involving WebRTC, VoIP and cloud services.