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Comment by pcl | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been looking around the iOS App Store for exactly that app, for playing multiplayer card games with one dealer while on a train etc. Haven’t found the right thing yet, but the App Store is sooo spammy especially when it comes to card game apps. Does anyone know of such a thing?

(As far as I know, the p2p requirements mean that on iOS at least, this cannot be implemented as a web app. Again, would love to learn that I’m wrong.)

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One might be able to do this with peer to peer networking through WebRTC. You still need a way to send each phone an SDP offer/answer but maybe this could be done with QR codes.

But that still depends on a pre-established route between the devices (shared wifi etc), right? Native apps can do WiFi Direct and BT and whatnot as well.

This could be one of the rare opportunities for more backend-oriented people (well, "non-front-end" people) to make something end-user-interesting by taking some appropriately licenced UI and running with it: put an existing "card table" web client in a tauri app and add some "Desk Area Network" distributed backend.

Might be a fun demonstration project for persons or orgs wanting to show off distributed consistency protocols. You might even add some blockchain to the mix if you have a thing for stale buzzwords. For a company with a product in the distributed consistency field, it could make a nice trade show booth giveaway: "this is actually our product, and you can even challenge each other on the plane back home, that's how special it is"

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