October 2017 Summaries

Agora, a company focused on pushing boundaries in mobile communications, has developed an SDK that enables game developers to easily integrate live voice chat into their mobile games without affecting game performance. This development is particularly significant for Asia's growing mobile gaming market, which accounted for almost two-thirds of the $41 billion worldwide mobile games market in 2016. Agora's SDK provides high-quality audio optimized for mobile gaming and can support an unlimited number of gamers across all geographies. The product has received positive feedback from both developers and users during its extensive beta launch within Asia, which included some of the most popular games in the region.

Apple's announcement of support for WebRTC technology in iOS11 and Safari marks a significant step towards mainstream adoption of embedded real-time communication (RTC) solutions. While WebRTC 1.0 covers the fundamentals, there is still much development work to be done on features such as background processing and improvements in codecs. Apple's endorsement will likely boost visibility and incentivize WebRTC development for mobile endpoints, leading to discussions on quality and scale. Challenges include working with low-end devices that do not yet support WebRTC and addressing scalability and quality of experience issues due to unpredictable public network conditions. Agora.io is working towards building the industry's first RTC platform with web-to-native interoperability, aiming to tackle these challenges and provide a full-stack solution for high-quality audio and video communication on a planetary scale.