[Discussion] Migrating away from flutter_callkit_incoming?

[td2thinh]

Has there been any discussions internally (since I cannot find a public slack or equivalent) regarding making your own plugin for the features you use in flutter_callkit_incoming? I find this plugin hard to work with as there is hardly any helpful communications from the developer, there's no code convention or contribution guide, the issues and the PRs are being ignored, leading to no traces of why a certain things are implemented the way they are and why certain lines of codes exist.

[renefloor]

Hi @td2thinh,

For every dependency we are always considering if we should contribute to the existing project, or fork the project so we are more flexible in creating changes we need. When we choose to fork we can either embed it directly in our existing package, for example in stream_video_push_notification or actually keep the fork as standalone package.

Would you be interested specifically in a fork of flutter_callkit_incoming, or do you think stream_video could benefit from embedding this functionality directly?

[td2thinh]

I had thought about forking flutter_callkit_incoming myself but I'm wondering if it's better to start from scratch since it's not easy forking something with the issues I mentioned. My motivation also comes from the fact that I had spent so many hours to understand why a certain bugs or unexpected behavior happened and tried to make this plugin work in all cases.

Right now, as of version 2.5.3, this plugin doesn't even work on Android 14 when the device is locked, which will be the state of the device most of the time.

I actually made a PR months ago where I explained why this problem existed and what I did to fix them but the developer didnt give any inputs. They instead just came out with an alpha version attempting to fix various issues but they didnt bother to explain what they added or removed, which frustrates me further.

EDIT: I created this issue here because you guys seem to be the largest open source project that have this plugin as a depedency.

[renefloor]

I understand your questions and it's a good idea to reach out to other community members.

I expect that if we decide to fork the functionality that we would directly integrate it into our stream_video_push_notification package so we have full flexibility to make the functionality the way we want and need and make it easily compatible with our own push notification system. I don't expect we will create a standalone callkit package that can be used by other developers.

[td2thinh]

I didnt expect that either but there would be more references for other developers. As of right now, afaik, there is no in production open source projects in Flutter with such features.

[renefloor]

@td2thinh FYI, we started working on it: #1044

[td2thinh]

@td2thinh FYI, we started working on it: #1044

Thanks for the heads up. I'm not sure it would be appropriate for me to point these things out but maybe they are helpful to you guys or any kind soul that may stumble upon this.

I think the custom implementation of a Call Service of flutter_callkit_incoming is starting to fail and is hard to maintain with the changes in Android's updates (Which is why they just added back an empty implementation of ConnectionService). My humble opinion is that it should be a true implementation following Google's guidelines for a self-managed application, meaning we would need to refacto the "Call" managing logic into the implemented class, the Call class itself looks prime to be an implementation of the Connection abstract class/interface. EDIT: https://developer.android.com/reference/kotlin/android/telecom/ConnectionService.

As for the iOS implementation, it's not clear to me how it is the way it is, it looks kind of messy, not sure why following the example from Apple didnt work: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/callkit/voip-calling-with-callkit, could be because of WebRTC related issues that I have seen so many threads about while trying to make it work flawlessly.

On the other hand, I have been referring back a lot to the repos of the SignalApp, afaik, it's the only large scale in production WebRTC app that's open source, dropping it here in anyhow, https://github.com/signalapp.