I think this is ultimately my confusion. I'm at the point now where I'm actually usually advising family members on devices that rely less on browsers. Why not show a chat from gmail/whatever in a browser to a regular app on an android/ipad device? Even better, include another app in there. Just to really drive home how "open" this is.
Also, why is this stuff better than SIP related technology from a while back?
I believe gchat would do that, google hangouts might integrate with the ios/android app as well (I have not tried this).
The excitement here is that this is a non-flash solution, so technically it will work on any device that can run Chrome, regardless of whether or not it can / wants to run Flash. So in the near future this may make it into Chrome for Android and iOS.
WebRTC is a very necessary step in removing Flash's hooks into the modern internet; after this, there will be very few reasons to support it at all anymore. And that is a very good thing for speed, compatibility, and security.
I guess I'm just confused by two points. First, the odd belief that non-flash automatically equals good. Second, that non-flash for some reason necessitated "in browser." Why?
Neither of these automatically grants any additional security. If anything, it is just tying us to fewer vendors that can do this. I guess it doesn't matter, but I can recall a time when I was able to choose which application handled certain content type. We seem to be saying we do not want that for video now.
Also, why is this stuff better than SIP related technology from a while back?