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Comment by joshontheweb | Hacker News Reader

Apple please, please add WebRTC support to Safari. I have a business that relies on WebRTC and not a day goes by where customers don't ask me if it will work on iOS devices. I have to explain the situation all the time. It is expecially hard for clients to understand since apple allows other browsers in the iOS store but they are just wrappers around Safari and have the same limitations.

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It's in development: https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webrtc

You can use OpenWebRTC on iOS to provide support there.

OpenWebRTC (by Ericsson) has a number of LGPL dependencies, and the way apps are packaged on iOS (eg, totally locked down) makes it difficult to completely follow through on the requirements of the LGPL, from a technical perspective. I'm not sure if iOS dynamic linking makes this easier?

That's without getting into the question of whether the LGPL is legally compatible with the App Store TOS. While the LGPL's use/redistribution requirements aren't as stringent as the GPL's, I'm not qualified to make that analysis, and IIRC it hasn't been tested anywhere.

The WebRTC implementation found at webrtc.org, which is used by Chrome, can also be used by mobile apps, including iOS. It's BSD licensed and used by many mobile apps.

(I work on the WebRTC team)

Is there a way to reasonably compile it out as its own so? I looked into it last year and it seemed you could not build Chromium's webrtc independently at all. Mozilla uses it by literally cloning and building Chromium trunk and taking the so out of it.

I'm really hoping Apple will get it into gear soon enough that I don't have to develop a separate iOS app.

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