Browsers and device coverage
WebRTC is available today on all modern browsers. It can be compiled and ported to native environments - desktop, mobile and embedded ones. For the majority of use cases, WebRTC is the right technology to use.
Additional resources
- The video lesson this time deals with browser and device coverage for WebRTC, and what are the common techniques when it isn't available. You can read more about browser support of WebRTC
- If you are contemplating using a WebRTC mobile SDK, you should probably read this: How to pick the right WebRTC mobile SDK build for your application
- Listing of various WebRTC stack implementation and another list of libWebRTC alternatives
- Here is a WebRTC Device Cheat Sheet that you can follow when trying to get WebRTC to work on various devices
Other links
- Why Safari is the biggest headache for developers
- I like this article by Discord on why they maintain and invest in browser support for their app
- For mobile browsers use, Twilio created a short best practices post that is quite useful
- Walkthroughs for compiling WebRTC library for Android: March 2023, September 2025
- A good comparison between PWA and native mobile apps
- How Google is optimizing WebRTC in libwebrtc
- Dyte has a good overview of libwebrtc and its innerworkings
- If you are going to compile libwebrtc yourself, then check out the libwebrtc compilation flags
- How to find specific Chrome version source code for libwebrtc
- Google has written some documentation for the C++ library
- How to debug WebRTC in each browser
Questions & answers
Can I run WebRTC in iOS?
Yes. If you have iOS 11 or higher and Safari.
Inside apps as part of a WebView - not yet (we're almost there).
Also remember that since WebRTC is open source, you can take the code, integrate it with your iOS app and use it.
When will WebRTC work on Safari?
It already does. Safari 11 has WebRTC support for it.
When will WebRTC work on Internet Explorer?
Never.
Microsoft moved on to Edge and probably won’t invest in adding new things such as WebRTC into a browser they are actively trying to kill. Oh, and Edge moved to use Chromium, which is used inside Chrome as well.
Will WebRTC kill mobile apps?
No.
People will still consume their services through applications on mobile devices, but now, web browsing on mobile has the ability to offer real-time communications when needed without installing any app.
Is there a way to build a WebRTC app with Ionic for iOS and Android app ?
Yes.
On iOS it must be Ionic Native, and you will need to use a WebRTC plugin/extension for Cordova. I am not sure there’s a good out-of-the box solution for it at the moment.
But it is possible.
Resources16
Q&A Videos
- What browser versions to support with WebRTC?
- Should you support old browser versions?
- What is libWebRTC?
Kranky Geek Videos
- Facebook Messenger RTC – The Challenges and Opportunities of Scale (SF 2017)
- WebRTC Browsers Roundtable (SF 2019)
- WebRTC Browsers 2020 Update - Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari (Virtual 2020)
- Making WebRTC on the Mobile Web Wonderful (Virtual 2021)
- Developing a cross-platform WebRTC API using Rust and WebAssembly (Virtual 2021)
- Best practices in Electron-based desktop development for WebRTC (Virtual 2021)