MOQ Mobile: Building Real-Time iOS and Android Apps

MOQ mobile app development could transform smartphones into first-class endpoints for real-time media, serving as both media sources and destinations. These native iOS and Android applications can publish and subscribe to various types of data, including camera, microphone, screen, and application data, through a relay. While MOQ is not a production-ready replacement for all mobile WebRTC workflows, its publish-and-subscribe model offers an intriguing foundation for one-to-many and large-scale interactive applications.

The article explores the potential of MOQ Mobile, which focuses on the growing importance of native mobile applications in real-time media applications. Since phones are already central to various aspects of live commerce, creator platforms, sports, remote monitoring, public safety, and field operations, they possess the necessary hardware components (cameras, microphones, display, sensors, local storage, and network connections) to serve as both sources and destinations for media.

MOQ Transport organizes media and application data as addressable objects within tracks and groups. Mobile clients can publish or subscribe to these tracks through a relay, which handles fan-out and can participate in a larger delivery network. The IETF MoQ Transport draft is still in evolution, requiring developers to track versions and test interoperability rather than assuming compatibility between different versions or libraries.

For MOQ to succeed, it needs practical implementations across clients, relays, encoders, players, and devices. The MOQ5 open-source native C library, developed by the Red5 team, provides a transport-independent protocol core and higher-level services for sending and receiving media. MOQ5 currently has Swift integration for Apple platforms and Kotlin support for Android. Red5's team is building iOS and Android SDKs on top of MOQ5, aiming not just for playback but also for publishing and subscribing through MOQ.

Other efforts outside MOQ5, such as Bitmovin's MoQKit, provide preview Swift and Kotlin APIs for publishing and playing low-latency streams on iOS and Android. However, it is essential to note the distinction between MOQ5 and these other libraries, as the APIs and relay compatibility may still change.