Every platform team was building its own video player and the implementations drifted apart. One codebase now ships to React Native and Unity on the same native engines, with 41 parity differences closed.
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Iris Video Player is a drop-in HLS streaming player, engine and full interface, shipped as two packages from one codebase: a React Native package and a Unity package.
Both sit on the same native engines, Media3 and ExoPlayer on Android and AVPlayer on iOS. Aipxperts built it with reference applications for native Android, native iOS, React Native and Unity alongside. Its users are developers, not viewers. The people ultimately watching are families and children.
The problem
Every platform team was building its own video player, and the results diverged. That is a predictable outcome rather than a failure of care. A React Native team reaches for one library, a Unity team for another, and each solves the same twenty problems slightly differently. The cost shows up in three places:
A gesture works one way in one app and another way somewhere else, and nobody notices until a user does.
A bug found in the React Native player has to be found again, understood again and fixed again in Unity.
Playback stability suffers when a cross-platform abstraction sits between the app and the operating system's own decoder.
That last point rules out the obvious shortcut. Writing the player once in JavaScript or in C# would have given identical behaviour instantly and worse playback everywhere, which for a video product is the wrong trade.
What we built
We kept the decoders native and shared everything above them.
Automatic and manual quality selection, so the player adapts to the connection and the viewer can override it.
Transport controls, scrub bar, playback speed and audio language selection.
Volume and brightness swipe, plus pinch-to-zoom for aspect switching.
Accidental-touch protection, which matters because the end viewers here are small children holding the device.
Autoplay, next and previous, a carousel sheet and an end screen.
Download progress and storage management through Media3's DownloadService.
Casting on both ecosystems, wired to the native implementations rather than reimplemented.
System PiP on both platforms, with the Unity build's post-processor patching the manifest and PiP configuration automatically at build time.
Orientation handling, safe-area awareness, tablet-aware layout, haptics, and five theme presets including a Kids theme.
A menu item that builds the entire player hierarchy in the editor, with the package distributed as an embedded folder so integrating teams can edit it directly.
The outcome
The engineering result is that a fix now happens once. The product result is that a child gets the same video experience whether the screen they are holding was built in React Native or in Unity.
Kotlin
Media3 / ExoPlayer
Swift
React Native
TypeScript
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