Squaring the WebRTC Circle

Last week I talked a little bit about what I think of as “the squaring the circle problem,” which is part of all creative design work.

Some of our goals in any creative effort, whether we’re designing software UIs or hardware products or anything else, will exist in tension with other goals. So finding elegant ways to have our cake and eat it too is part of the fun and the frustration of designing anything.

And sometimes you can’t have your cake and eat it too. So, clearly prioritizing the most important goals is, well, the most important thing.

And this weekend I was writing some notes about the WebRTC standard and the design decisions that shaped the effort early on, which is a really good example of this challenge of balancing competing goals.

And it’s something we think a lot about at Daily because WebRTC is core to our video and audio APIs for developers.

The designers of WebRTC pushed the standard very hard in the direction of flexibility, of supporting a wide variety of current and future use cases.

This has proven to be very valuable. Billions of minutes of video and audio every month are powered by products and platforms that leverage WebRTC. In fact, today almost all of the major real-time video and audio applications are built on top of WebRTC. But the flexibility designed into the WebRTC spec came with one big downside.

Lack of interoperability.

Products and services built on top of WebRTC generally can’t talk to each other. You can’t do a FaceTime call to a WhatsApp user, for example. Flexibility on the one hand, interoperability on the other. Trade-offs.

There’s work going on now to design standards on top of WebRTC that allow for interoperability for specific use cases.

If those standards gain traction, maybe we’ll have squared this particular circle.

We’ll have flexibility in the low-level standard WebRTC, and interoperability fostered by higher level standards like WHIP and WHEP that are being worked on now.

It’s going to be fun to see how things evolve.

Today’s music is “Golden Oolong Tea” from Erena Terakubo’s 2015 album “A Time For Love.” David Hazeltine on Piano. David Williams on bass. Lewis Nash on drums.