Transport Choices

The DropOnAir signaling layer offers multiple transport lanes you can pick from per environment. WebSocket is the default and works for the vast majority of integrations; alternative lanes solve specific environment constraints (restrictive networks, mobile cellular, IoT). Pick what fits; the platform never forces a choice.

Available lanes

• WebSocket (wss://sdk.droponair.com/ws) - default, universal. Binary protobuf framing, JWT auth on handshake. Stable since v1.
• HTTP fallback (SSE + POST) — see details. For corporate networks where WebSocket upgrades are blocked but plain HTTPS works. Available since SDK 0.19.0.
• WebTransport / HTTP/3 — see details. For modern browsers + cellular networks. Available since SDK 0.20.0.
• MQTT (mqtts://mqtt.droponair.com:8883) — see details. For IoT subscribers that want to consume broadcast channels without our SDK. Subscribe-only, TLS + per-app credentials, no publish path.
• Native QUIC adapters — planned. iOS Network.framework + Android Cronet for native cellular performance.

Discover what's currently available via GET /api/info: the transports array advertises every lane the server is ready to accept on this deployment, and the features array includes "transport_abstraction" + "transport_<lane>" entries per active lane.

Backward-compatibility contract: WebSocket on /ws stays the default; alternative lanes are opt-in. Older SDK versions in the field never need to know alternative lanes exist; they continue connecting to WebSocket exactly as today.