react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals

WebTransport support in RN

bfelbo opened this issue · 0 comments

Introduction

WebTransport is an exciting new way to easily add low-latency UDP sockets for your application. To quote WebKit:

Providing unidirectional and bidirectional streams, as well as potentially-unreliable datagrams, with no head of line blocking and minimal latency overhead is an important and useful addition to the web.

Details

WebTransport is now supported by 76%+ of global devices and WebKit proclaimed their support of WebTransport so we might get Safari support this summer, which would make it supported across all major browsers 🥳 The HTTP/3 stack has also been maturing significantly so it's getting easier and easier to use WebTransport as part of a backend setup.

RN natively supports WebSocket and WebTransport feels very similar. WebTransport is much more lightweight than WebRTC and focused on the client-server use case, which is likely useful for many RN apps.

Discussion points / questions

  1. Should RN support WebTransport natively or should it be handled by a community library?
  2. What's needed for RN to support WebTransport?