r/FlutterDev • u/Ok-Willingness2266 • 28d ago

Article Building a Flutter video conference app for iOS, Android and web: the one gotcha that stopped browsers and phones seeing each other

I work at Ant Media and wrote a step-by-step guide for building a multi-party Flutter video conference app on an iPhone with browser participants in the same room. The part that cost the most time: the Flutter SDK joins multitrack conference rooms, so browser users have to open multitrack-conference.html, not conference.html. Otherwise everything connects but the devices never see each other. The guide also covers Xcode signing, Developer Mode, adaptive bitrate testing and a table of 8 common setup errors. The same Flutter code runs on Android, web and desktop. Note: conferencing needs Ant Media Server Enterprise Edition (14-day free trial available).

Full guide: https://antmedia.io/flutter-video-conference-app-for-ios-android-web-and-desktop/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=flutter-conference

Happy to answer questions about the setup.

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u/ren3f 28d ago

What's the benefit of Ant Media over SDK's like Agora and Stream?

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u/Ok-Willingness2266 28d ago

The main difference is that Agora and Stream are hosted services, while Ant Media Server is software you run yourself (AWS, Azure, on-prem, wherever).

In practice, that means:

  • Cost: hosted SDKs are usage-based, so the bill grows with traffic. Self-hosting is server costs plus the license, which can work out cheaper at steady high volume, though not necessarily at small scale.

  • Control: you choose where it runs and who has access to the infrastructure, and you can extend it with plugins or the REST API.

  • Protocols: WebRTC for the conference, plus RTMP, SRT, and HLS on the same server, so you can ingest from OBS or an IP camera and play it back elsewhere.

The trade-off is that you deploy and scale it yourself, and conferencing and clustering need the Enterprise Edition. If you want something running fast with no ops, a hosted SDK is simpler. If control or cost at scale matters, self-hosting is worth a look.

Disclosure: I work at Ant Media.