Google used to provide prebuild Android images of libWebRTC library, and in fact, it’s (still) the recomended way to use them on its own documentation. But starting on WebRTC M80 release (January 2020), they decided to deprecate the binary mobile libraries, and the reasons were that the builds were intended just only for development purposses, and users were already using building themselves with their own customizations, or using third party libraries that embeded them (where have been left developers that just want to build a WebRTC enabled mobile app?), and they just only provided another build in August 2020 (1.0.32006) to fill some important security holes, in case someone (everybody?) was still using the binary mobile libraries.

editor’s note: content updated on February 27nd 2023 to reflect the latest changes in the build process.

In addition to that, that binary libraries are available to use with Maven, but Bintray will be deprecated on May 1st 2021, and seems they will not be available after February 1st 2022, so it’s not clear if the binary mobile libraries would still be available when using Maven itself.

Due to both problems (no new libraries versions, and not sure about future availability of current ones), and since I’ve not able to find other online providers for the binary libraries, best option seems to waste some hard disk space (16GB… it downloads all the Chrome source code and the build environment tools) and compile them myself. The automated build script that generates the binary mobile library .aar file was published and there are instructions to build it yourself, that’s a huge advantage over needing to compile and build the libraries yourself by hand. But while I was using it, I’ve found some issues and errors in the instructions themselves when executing them on Ubuntu 21.04 (released just yesterday :-) ), so here are the fixed instructions with some additional comments:

1. Create a new folder where to work in. This seems obvious, but if not, you’ll end up filling with garbage your $HOME directory (I’m n00b). Maybe having there the tools and a big src/ folder where to host all company projects makes sense inside Google organization itself…:

   mkdir webrtc_android
   cd webrtc_android
   

2. Download the Chromium depot_tools, and export them:

   git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
   export PATH=$PATH:$PWD/depot_tools
   

3. Install Python. depot_tools makes use of the python executable, because it’s compatible with both Python 2 and 3. On Ubuntu 21.04 it’s not available since it was traditionally linked to the now deprecated Python 2, and to differenciate from it, it was being used the python3 executable, so in a clean slate install, depot_tools will fail because it’s not found. To fix that, we can install the python-is-python3 package:

   sudo apt install python-is-python3
   

4. Install snap. I hate it (I’m old school, and an APT fan), but now Chromium build tools make use of bazel, and it’s only available as snap packages, at least for recent versions. I will need to review this in the future, but for now, just install it:

   sudo apt install snap
   

5. Get the build environment tools and Chromium source code using depot_tools, and cd inside it. This will a 16GB checkout and will take A LONG TIME. In my case, it lasted 4.5 hours for the fetch command and more than one hour for the gclient one…:

   fetch --nohooks webrtc_android
   gclient sync
   cd src
   

6. Update all system dependencies. It should not be needed, but the fact is that building the library has failed me in a slate install of Ubuntu 22.04. After updating the system to the latests packages, it worked fine. So, just in case, execute the following commands:

   apt update
   apt upgrade
   apt dist-upgrade
   

7. Install build dependencies. This will download again more dependencies, in this case system wide build tools. One of them will be Python 2, so the previously installed python-is-python3 package will be removed:

   ./build/install-build-deps.sh
   

   In case you are not using one of the Ubuntu LTS versions, you may need to use the --unsupported flag to by-pass the version checks and install the dependencies, but it didn’t worked for me. Your mileage may vary.

8. Select the release to build. Until WebRTC M80 release, there were branches for each one of the Chromium releases, so it was easy to know what version was each one, but after that, Google started to create branches in a daily basis. Use what’s currently in master branch or from any of the daily branches is totally fine, but if you want to build the exact copy of the library of a particular release, you can search for your desired Milestion at Chromium data website, and match it with the WebRTC column to find the daily branch number. For example, to build the libWebrtc library version used by latest stable Chrome 110 (build number 5481) you would just need to change to the branch-heads/5481:

   git checkout branch-heads/5481
   

   This will left the repository in detached mode, but it’s not something to worry about. Also, you can see all available branches in case you want to use another daily branch by executing git branch -r. At this moment, latest one is 5620 (dev branch is at 5615).

   Once changed to the desired daily build branch, we need to reset and sync the repository code, and download again more dependencies and code. It seems this is needed because previous gclient when we were in master branch would have left some temporal files (maybe we could have changed branches before?) so the build could fail, so this way we make sure to have the correct ones:

   gclient revert
   gclient sync
   

9. Finally, compile the AAR file. This will compile libWebrtc library for all the Android native supported platforms (arm64-v8a, armeabi-v7a, x86 and x86_64) and package them in a libwebrtc.aar file in the root of the src folder that can be used in our Android project as a local dependency or published to our own Maven repository:

   tools_webrtc/android/build_aar.py
   

10. Once we have build the library, to update the code and build newer versions is just a matter of run git remote update to get the new daily build branches, and compile again. In case of problems, repeat the steps 6 and 7 to fully download again the build tools and dependencies and compile once again.

Ideally, all this steps could be automated and run in a nightly basis, creating a new reference in Maven to this automated builds. Github Actions could do a good job for this, storing the nightly builds as project releases or also as a Github Packages Maven repository, but the Github Actions only provides 2000 minutes per month (a bit more than 1 hour per day), so without a cache it would be problematic to generate nightly builds, but checking only to run where there are new Milestones (similar to what I do in OS lifecycle repo), it could probably work… Maybe one day I’ll implement it :-) By the moment, the raw JSON info for the different Milestones can be found at https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/fetch_milestones.

Bonus update: add the library as a dependency

An important topic I’ve not covered before: how to use the compiled .aar file. Android documentation has full info about how to create and use libraries as dependencies with Android Studio, but the important steps for our use case are:

1. Add the libwebrtc.aar file:

   1. Click File > New > New Module.
   2. Click Import .JAR/.AAR Package, then click Next.
   3. Enter the location of the libwebrtc.aar file then click Finish.

   Android Studio creates a module directory, copies the libwebrtc.aar file into the module, and generates a build.gradle file for it, with the following contents:

   configurations.maybeCreate("default")
   artifacts.add("default", file('libwebrtc.aar'))
   

2. Make sure the libwebrtc library is listed at the top of your settings.gradle file, like this:

   include ':app', ':libwebrtc'
   

3. Open the app module’s build.gradle file and add a new line for the libwebrtc library to the dependencies block as shown in the following snippet:

   dependencies {
      implementation project(":libwebrtc")
   }
   

   In case there was a reference to the old libwebrtc library from the Maven registry, remove it too.

4. Click Sync Project with Gradle Files.

From now on, next project builds will be using your build of the libwebrtc.aar file located at libwebrtc/libwebrtc.aar, instead of obsolete one provided by Maven.