News

New Open Source SDKs for Native In-App Communications Released

• By David Ramel
• August 13, 2015

Digium Inc. has unveiled open source SDKs aimed at helping mobile developers add real-time, in-app communications to their iOS and Android projects.

Leveraging the Respoke WebRTC (real-time communications for Web apps) back-end platform, the new software development kits enable instant messaging; live WebRTC voice and video calling; and free push notifications and calls even if a device isn't connected to a network or an app is running in the background, the company said.

The new SDKs fulfill a promise Digium made when it launched the Respoke cloud platform for Web developers in February. "Developers interface with Respoke using an intuitive JavaScript library, RESTful APIs, and soon, mobile SDKs," the company said at the time. "A robust, scalable cloud infrastructure handles all of the complex back-end aspects of making real-time communications work."

The SDKs for iOS and Android are being open sourced under an MIT license and are available on GitHub.

"Until now, building in-app communications features on native mobile platforms has required a small army of specialized experts, people with a deep understanding of call signaling, media subsystem integration, codecs, encryption and packetization," said company exec Steven Sokol in a blog post Monday.

"The Respoke libraries handle identity, message delivery, call signaling, and -- in an industry first -- mobile push notifications," Sokol continued. "You simply add code to handle various events and to incorporate various Respoke features into your UI. Adding a rich suite of in-app communications features typically takes only a few hours of planning and coding."

The native app SDKs support identity, message delivery and call signaling, and are integrated with the CocoaPods dependency manager/package repository for iOS apps and the Maven repository for Android apps.

Although the SDKs are open source, the Respoke back-end platform costs a minimum of $10 per month, with higher tiers going up from there. A 30-day trial is available.