With the rise of online ordering and the growth of delivery, consumers and businesses alike order more packages, expect them faster, and want rapid updates on progress, delays, and changes. Companies providing transportation and logistics services, then, have a compelling reason to add realtime update features to their apps. In other articles, we’ve talked about the broad challenges transport and logistics companies face when providing realtime updates, including scalability and low latency.

In the past decade, chat apps have gone from being a disruptive new technology to something we use every day. Today, WhatsApp boasts over 2 billion daily active users, by far the market leader, followed by WeChat with 1.3 billion and Facebook Messenger at just under 1 billion. Chat apps, put simply, are going nowhere. In that time, customers have come to expect a consistent experience across their chat apps – and a core set of functionality has evolved across all major providers.

Elasticity, as the term implies, is the ability for software infrastructure to stretch and shrink in line with fluctuating usage. Elasticity is important in many contexts – because usage can always fluctuate – but it’s especially important for sports, media, and entertainment apps, which frequently serve user bases that grow and shrink rapidly depending on events, trends, and breaking news.

The transportation and logistics industries contain much more complexity than the average consumer would guess. When they build apps, they need to provide a simple, intuitive experience supported by a complex and most often unseen system of vehicles criss-crossing neighborhoods, states, and countries, supported by employees and systems working from behind the scenes to orchestrate the processes necessary to make this all work smoothly.

Code Story is a podcast that invites tech leaders to reflect on their journeys, the products they’ve created, their successes, and their mistakes. Our CEO Matthew O’Riordan recently spoke with host Noah Labhart to share more about Ably’s story and the lessons he’s learned along the way. You can listen to the full episode here, but we’ve pulled out a few highlights below.

Hardly anyone is stricter about data integrity than people who closely follow the news – even if they don’t use the term. If a user is monitoring a live feed of updates about a legal case or a bill in progress, they will switch feeds without hesitation if updates are repeated or out of order.

Amazon was founded in 1994, went public in 1997, and reached a market cap of $1.5 trillion in 2020. As a result of Amazon’s successes and a long tail of rapidly modernizing ecommerce businesses, consumers and businesses alike have transformed their expectations around transportation and logistics. Consumers, for example, expect up-to-the-minute updates on package delivery, and businesses require, among other features, realtime asset and vehicle monitoring.

Python is a popular programming language known for its simplicity and versatility. It's commonly used for web development, data analysis, and automation. While it's not usually associated with client-side development, it can be useful in scenarios where server-side applications need to exchange data in realtime. This is why we’ve released a new Python Realtime SDK component that enables developers to integrate Ably's realtime functionality into their Python applications.

Latency is a technical term that, even for the people who use it every day, tends to feel abstract. When a metric calls for measurement by the millisecond, it’s easy to forget just how valuable each millisecond is. But if your application promises to deliver realtime updates – especially in the sports, media, and entertainment industries – low latency has to become a high priority and the experience your users have with latency needs to be vivid.

At first glance, sports fans, news geeks, and pop culture enthusiasts seem largely dissimilar. Often, as a result, the apps that serve these groups are largely different – with a sports app comparing the stats of different athletes and a celebrity news app sharing video interviews and gossip. But when these seemingly different users log on to these different apps, they’ll likely all expect the same thing: A fresh update published mere seconds after they opened the app.