Amazon aggressively market’s its Mayday button for the Kindle. Does this use WebRTC?
Many in the industry, including myself, reference Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX Mayday button as using WebRTC or at least as something that is WebRTC like. The Kindle Fire HDX is not available everywhere, so if you have not seen this the Android Authority has a good video of this feature here.
First lets think about how we tell if an app is using WebRTC. If the app is a webpage it is fairly simple – just look for the use of the getUserMedia and CreatePeerConnection APIs in the site’s Javascript using your browser’s developer console. It is a little more complex if WebRTC is embedded inside a native application. We could start with a debate about “What makes an app a WebRTC app”? If it uses part of WebRTC source code and not the W3C API’s does it count? Since this blog is for developers, not philosophers, let’s start by figuring out what Mayday actually does by looking at a Wireshark trace.
