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.
The launch screen appears not centered and/or clipped on certain
devices. Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce it when I deploy the app to
devices and Simulator from Xcode 8.1. It may (or may very well not) be
that the Xcode version matters and the enterprise build server does
appear to use an older Xcode version.
LaunchScreen.xib compiles locally with Xcode 8.1 but the enterprise
build fails. A possibility is that the enterprise build machine is
running an older Xcode version.
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.
Saúl Ibarra Corretgé
Lyubomir Marinov
Yana Stamcheva