Time has come. We need to enable bitcode. It's optional for iOS targets, but
mandatory for the entire project if there is a watchOS target. Since we have a
watchOS target, it's time to enable it.
This is done at the app level, not the SDK.
Currently 2 Firebase services are used:
- Crashlytics
- Dynamic Links
They are enabled in tandem, if the appropriate Google services file
(GoogleService-Info.plist on iOS or google-services.json on Android) is found.
Each service needs to be individually enabled in the Firebase console.
The upstream package has been unmaintained for 2 years now, and making the litle
changes needed as React Native needs them is getting old. The actual
funcionality is a couple of one-liners plus tons of boliterplate, which gets
reduced by quite a bit if we just embed it. So here it goes.
Use react-native-fastimage, which uses 2 full-native image impleentations using
well known and mature (native) libraries.
This gets us rid of 2 libraries which were observerd as a source of bugs and
created trouble with dependencies: react-native-fetch-blob and
react-native-img-cache. They are also no longer well maintained.
It will only be requested if a user joins a meeting or flips the switch from
video to audio and back, but never as the first thing when the welcome page is
mounted.
Adds base/sounds feature which allows other features to register a sound
source under specified id. A new SoundsCollection component will then
render corresponding HTMLAudioElement for each such sound. Once "setRef"
callback is called by the HTMLAudioElement, this element will be added
to the Redux store. When that happens sound can be played through the
new 'playSound' action which will call play() method on the stored
HTMLAudioElement instance.
Avatars are cached to the filesystem and loaded from there when requested again.
The cache is cleaned after a conference ends and on application startup
(defensive move).
In addition, implement a fully local avatar system, which is used as a fallback
when loading a remote avatar fails. It can also be forced using a prop.
The fully local avatars use a user icon as a mask and apply a background color
qhich is picked by hashing the URI passed to the avatar. If no URI is passed a
random color is chosen.
A grace period of 1 second is also implemented so a default local avatar will be
rendered if an Avatar component is mounted but has no URI. If a URI is specified
later on, it will be loaded and displayed. In case loading the remote avatar
fails, the locally generated one will be used.
1. Aligns the project structure of Jitsi Meet SDK for iOS with that for
Android for better comprehension.
2. The command `react-native run-ios` uses the last Xcode project or
workspace in the list of these sorted in alphabetical order. Which
limits our freedom in naming. Thus having only an Xcode project in
the root directory of the iOS project structure gives us back the
freedom in naming.
3. Allows the Podspec to work for the app project in addition to the sdk
project because we need Crashlytics in the app which is integrated
via Cocoapods as well.
4. Further removes references to JitsiKit in the source code for the
sake of consistent naming.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Jitsi Meet SDK for iOS, the
mobile SDK which powers Jitsi Meet.
The goal is to encapsulate the entire React Native app into a framework / SDK
and offer an API for native (ObjC or Swift) applications to embed the Jitsi
conferencing experience.
While React Native can be embedded in native applications, I don't think it was
designed to be embedded as part of a framework, hidden away from the application
using it. This surfaced as a number of issues which had to be addressed
specifically due to our use-case:
- Universal / deep linking needed to be wrapped to avoid the embedding app from
linking with RN.
- The bundle URL had to be manually constructed, since RN considers that all
resources are in the main bundle, but in case of a framework that is not the
case.
- Custom fonts had to be manually loaded, since UIAppFonts doesn't work on the
framework's Info.plist file.
- The RN packager has to be manually triggered since the React project will no
longer do it for us.
- Custom App Transport Security rules were added since the builtin way to do it
modifies the framework's Info.plist, which is useless in this case.
At this stage, the Jitsi Meet application is just a small single view
application which uses the Jitsi Meet SDK to create a single view which
represents the entire application. Events and external conference handling are
forthcoming.