FaceTime finally faces WebRTC - implementation deep dive - webrtcHacks

During this year’s WWDC keynote, Apple announced the availability of FaceTime in web browsers, making it available to Android and Windows users. It has been six years since the last time we looked at FaceTime (FaceTime Doesn’t Face WebRTC) so it was about time for an update. It had to be WebRTC and as I’ll show – it is very much WebRTC.

FaceTime Web does use WebRTC for media and it uses the Insertable Streams API for end-to-end encryption. It also uses an interesting approach to avoid simulcast.

Fortunately, my old friend Dag-Inge Aas was around to set up a meeting and helped me grab the necessary data for analysis. Tooling has become a bit better since so in addition to the WebRTC internals dump I got an RTP dump and an SCTP dump from the Chrome logs as well as some of the JavaScript that does the end to end encryption (E2EE).

Upon pasting the invite link into my browser I get asked to enter my name and join the call which needs to be accepted by the person setting up the meeting. So far, it doesn’t seem like calls can be initiated from the web.

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