This guide details the requirements for integrating with the Google Meet Live Sharing feature. Before a third-party provider can use this feature, you must provide several pieces of information for the Meet team to properly allow the feature because it's currently in preview and isn't generally available.
Access form
The first step is to fill in this SDK access form, including the following details:
- Application identifier—A lowercase keyword (such as "youtube”) that uniquely identifies the specific provider. This identifier is used to facilitate identifying the provider during initiation with our Meet Live Sharing SDK, and to allow synchronization across clients. Unless the team with the specific rollout plan approves it, the identifier must not be changed. If this keyword does not match what Meet expects, live sharing will not work for this provider. These keywords are hardcoded in the Meet binary, which means a change to this keyword takes time to propagate to all users.
- List of Google Domain Accounts (such as 222larabrown@gmail.com) used for testing the integration on the provider’s side—The list of accounts is used to determine whether the feature should be turned on for this account in Meet. If an account is not in this list, the provider cannot connect to our Meet Live Sharing SDK and live sharing is not available.
- Android package name to handle launch from Meet—As part of the live sharing feature, Meet needs to launch an Android Intent to start the third-party provider application. Therefore, a specific app package name (such as “com.google.android.youtube”) must be provided. This package name is hardcoded in the Meet binary and must not change unless the team with the specific rollout plan approves it. Changes to this package without ensuring the Meet team have updated this accordingly will effectively turn off live sharing functionality.
- Google domain account—The Meet team will share a Google Drive folder with all Alpha deliverables required for the integration.
- Partner icon—An icon to be displayed next to the name of the live sharing application. Used on the Meet screen where users can select which live sharing application to launch.
Steps to onboard
Setup
- Download the Meet Live Sharing SDK from Google's Maven repository.
- Download and install Google Meet from the Google Play Store.
- Download, build, and install the sample app.
- Add the previously selected Google domain account to your test device.
- Start the Meet app and select the Google domain account that you added to the device in the previous step.
- Repeat the above installation and sign-in steps on any device you would like to test with.
Test using the provided live sharing sample application
- Start the Meet application on at least 2 devices.
- Create a meeting and make sure all devices have joined the same meeting.
- Select the “home” button on both devices to put Meet into picture-in-picture (PiP) mode and the meeting session continues.
- Launch the live sharing sample application on both devices.
- Inside the live sharing sample application, tap Join Meeting. Do this on both devices. The button text changes to Leave Meeting with a green bar below the text to indicate the app has successfully connected to the meeting.
- Inside the live sharing sample application, tap Co-watch. Do this on both devices. Once the toggle is turned on, communication between the 2 live sharing applications is established.
- You can now begin experimenting with the various UI elements in the sample application to simulate media playback functionality. Any action you take on one sample application is reflected on the other.
Provider integration and testing
The following steps are required if you would like to test the live sharing functionality with your application as a content provider. It requires that your app is integrated with the Meet Live Sharing SDK. It's imperative the information you provided during the onboarding process such as “Application identifier” and “Android package name” are correct because they're used to authenticate your application while communicating with the Meet application.
- Integrate the Meet Live Sharing SDK into your app. Refer to Android's Get started page for guidelines on usage or Android's API Reference section for specifics of the API.
- Make sure you are using Android Gradle Plugin's version 4.0.0 or greater while building your application. This is required to support Java 8+ API desugaring support. For more information, refer to this guide.
- Start the Meet application on at least 2 devices.
- Create a meeting and make sure all devices have joined the same meeting.
- Start live sharing from your own application. Once one device has begun live sharing, the other device where the Meet application is already running receives an invitation inside the call screen.
You can also launch your own application by selecting it from the Activities dialog that's accessible by following these steps:
- Inside the Meet application call screen, tap the menu.
- Tap the Activities button.
- Select your application in the list of Activities.
- The Meet application now moves into PIP mode and your application is launched.
External dependencies
Note: The Meet Live Sharing SDK specifies
dependencies
in its *.POM file. If you don't use Maven and choose to include the Meet Live Sharing SDK's *.AAR file directly, it's your responsibility to inspect the
*.POM file and ensure required dependencies are provided (e.g
androidx.concurrent:concurrent-futures:1.1.0).