Dames en heren, welcome to Jitsi Meet SDK for Android, the Jitsi Meet library
for Android.
The Jitsi Meet SDK encapsulates React Native and all the dependencies Jitsi
Meet has so other aopplications can integrate it easily.
Unlike iOS, creating "fat" libraries is not allways (if at all) possible on
Android, however, effort was put into making the integration as easy as
possible.
While React Native can be embedded in native applications, I don't think it was
designed to be embedded as part of an Android library, 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:
- Activity lifecycle methods must be linked with the React Native engine, so the
library provides wrapper methods.
- Custom fonts have to be manually added as assets, since the provided gradle
script doesn't work properly in a library target.
- The RN packager has to be manually triggered since the gradle script will no
longer do it for us.
At this stage, the Jitsi Meet application is just a small single activity
application which uses the Jitsi Meet SDK to create a single activity which
represents the entire application. Events and external conference handling are
forthcoming.
PS: Yours truly would like to add that it was a lot more fun to work on the iOS
side of things.
Some devices may give an error stating that INTERACT_ACROSS_USERS_FULL
permission is neeced. This permission can only be achieved by signing the
application with the same key as the system, which is never going to happen so
deal with it by catching any exceptions setting the mode may cause and failing
as gracefully as we can.
Ref:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34172575/audiomanager-setmode-securityexception-on-huawei-android-4
Now that Apple have approved build 1.3.204 for release in the App Store,
the short app version needs to be incremented; otherwise, no new builds
can be uploaded to TestFlight and, respectively, for release in the App
Store.
Now that Apple have approved build 1.2.199 for release in the App Store,
the short app version needs to be incremented; otherwise, no new builds
can be uploaded to TestFlight and, respectively, for release in the App
Store.
Turns out React Native's timers (setTimeout / setInterval) don't run while the
app is in the background: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/167
This patch replaces the global timer functions with those from the
react-native-background-timer package, which work in the background.
These timers won't magically make an application work in the background, but
they will run if an application already happens to run in the background. That's
our case while in a conference, so these timers will run, allowing XMPP pings to
be sent and the conference to stay up as long as the user desires.
The implementation varies across platforms, with the same goal: allow the app to
use the entire screen real state while in a conference.
On Android we use immersive mode, which will hide the status and navigation bars.
https://developer.android.com/training/system-ui/immersive.html
On iOS the status bar is hidden, with a slide effect.
Now that Apple have approved build 1.1.185 for release in the App Store,
the short app version needs to be incremented; otherwise, no new builds
can be uploaded to TestFlight and, respectively, for release in the App
Store.
Now that Apple have approved build 1.0.178 for release in the App Store,
the short app version needs to be incremented; otherwise, no new builds
can be uploaded to TestFlight and, respectively, for release in the App
Store.
Bundle our custom icon font jitsi.ttf in the Android app (which we
already do for the iOS app).
Additionally, remove icon font files which are not in use.
As a step toward merging jitsi-meet-react with jitsi-meet to share as
much source code as possible between mobile and Web, merge the part of
jitsi-meet-react's source tree which supports mobile inside the
jitsi-meet source tree and leave jitsi-meet-react's Web support in the
source code revision history but don't have it in master anymore because
it's different from jitsi-meet's Web support. In other words, the two
projects are mechanically merged at the file level and don't really
share source code between mobile and Web.