One-click video conversations without registration on iPhone | Hacker News Reader

One-click video conversations without registration on iPhone

blog.appear.in

42 pointsdagingaa16 comments

> "As far as we know, we are one of the first services built purely on WebRTC to launch a dedicated iOS app"

Hookflash [0] is a dedicated WebRTC iOS app that has been around since 2012 or so, and has a badass signaling layer with OpenPeer [1]... it also provides a SDK for building this kind of services in just a couple of hours.

But then you also have OpenTok [2], that has been offering a similar iOS SDK with native WebRTC stack since late 2012 / early 2013, Mashme.tv [3] also in 2013, EasyRTC in mid 2013 [4], and hundreds of similar apps and solutions that are popping up like mushrooms (AddLive, etc...) and also use WebRTC in iOS..

What I'm trying to say is that WebRTC on iOS is already a quite crowded space, and the first services were deployed years ago (late 2012)...

It would be more interesting to know what have you used in the signaling plane (websockets? pusher/pubnub? old sip?) how you have solved things like NAT traversal (TURN, ICE, Hole Punching, etc), or which solution you use for MCU...

[0] http://hookflash.com/

[1] http://openpeer.org/

[2] http://tokbox.com/opentok/

[3] http://www.mashme.tv/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzVqnP02zY

For those interested, this was realized using the open-source Objective-C library from the WebRTC project. https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%...

This is great! I've really enjoyed using the appear.in web client...I do like the zero configuration aspect, but more importantly it performs dramatically better than Skype or Google Hangouts, in terms of both CPU usage and video quality over a busy connection.

I've had many days where Hangouts was essentially unusable...stuttering, pixelated, and glitchy, but switching to an appear.in room worked nearly flawlessly, even with a group of several people. Looking forward to being able to use it on mobile!

This is awesome. You should update the FAQ page:

"Currently iOS does not offer support in browsers for services like appear.in. We are working on exploring how we can make appear.in available for iOS. To be the first to be notified when it is available, you can sign up here (http://eepurl.com/N8Bez)."

Well spotted, thanks :-)

>not possible to get WebRTC-based services

you can use previously discussed on HN jsmpeg to do MPEG streaming and decoding in pure javascript

http://instant-webcam.com/

If two iPhone users, each behind a different NAT router with upnp enabled, use this to converse, will the media stream go directly between them, or via an appear.in server?

the App store rules say:

"Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex "Chat Roulette")"

Once (if) this becomes popular it will have the chat roulette problem...

Actually, probably not. Snapchat used to have this "problem", and they were never kicked off the app store for it.

Looks very tempting, but how do you make money?

For now, I guess it's just surviving by being a subsidiary of the giant Telenor Group.

looks interesting...how are you storing user information?

how many people can join a video chat room at once?

"Video conversations with up to 8 people for free."

Guess there will be a paid plan later which allows more people.

Since it's webRTC, the traffic is point-to-point, right? I guess you would need a good connection for more than a few clients.

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