With most of our major presentations out of the way for now, SyncAssist is now ready to start our major project for this semester: development of our mobile app! As mentioned in Week 15, we’d decided to use the Expo Go framework with React Native, which allows us develop iOS apps without building on a Mac. Unfortunately, we’ve run into some minor roadblocks in this area.

It turns out that the Expo Go app that you can download from the App Store to run your app has no built-in support for WebRTC. This means that we’ll have to use Expo Dev Clients instead and build the app locally, which means we need Xcode 😭. Fortunately, one of our team members has a Macbook, so we’ll be offloading all of the iOS app building to him for now.

We also ran into some potential issues with integrating lib-jitsi-meet into our mobile app. Since it was a primarily web-focused library, it uses browser constructs like Document.querySelector and DOM traversal that aren’t a part of React Native. Fortunately, it looks like the developers of the Jitsi Meet mobile app solved this issue with polyfills for all of those browser functionalities, so we shouldn’t have much of an issue copying what they did.