Messaging

What it means to be a fan is changing. Whether the fandom focuses on a sports team, a streaming drama series, or a musical artist, fans no longer want to be passive consumers. Instead, they’re looking to feel as though they are a part of the action through channels such as live chat, realtime stats, and behind the scenes insights. But there’s a tension in delivering those fan engagement experiences. Without the right strategy, technology costs can quickly make them economically unviable.

Fandom is now global. And the extraordinary opportunity that presents is balanced by the demands that fan expectations place on your digital platform. No matter where they are–front-row seats or five timezones away–people engage with your fan experience to enjoy an immersive, immediate experience. However, as more fans take part, you might find that your platform hits a reliability and scale ceiling.

High-scale, high-frequency messaging and burst activity can lead to significant costs and performance challenges for realtime applications. Trying to solve for these spikes places additional cognitive load on development teams, slowing down development times. And because of this, all too often, developers have to shelve adding new features to their product. To solve this issue, we've introduced a powerful and simple-to-use cost optimization feature into Ably Pub/Sub: server-side message batching.

The Australian Open (AO) is one of the world’s premier annual sporting events. According to Tennis Australia, the 2024 edition - held over three weeks - reached over 558 million unique global viewers, a 57% increase from the previous year, and accumulated more than 2.17 billion cumulative viewers, up 24%. The event also attracted a record-breaking 1,110,657 fans to Melbourne Park.

We're happy to announce the release of message editing and deletion in our Javascript and React SDKs and within our NEW iOS and Android SDKs for Ably Chat. These additions will enable the development of richer chat experiences and simplify the development of cross-platform chat applications.

In light of the recent deprecation of MongoDB Atlas Device Sync (ADS), developers are seeking alternative solutions to synchronize on-device data with cloud databases. Ably LiveSync offers a potential alternative and can replace some of ADS’s functionality, enabling realtime synchronization of database changes to devices at scale.

There is increasing demand for realtime data delivery as users expect faster experiences and instantaneous transactions. This means not only is lower latency required per message, but providers must also handle far greater capacity in a more globally-distributed way.

Following the deprecation of Realm, we have partnered with MongoDB to ensure that MongoDB customers can continue to deliver the device sync capabilities their customers depend on. The solution: a MongoDB Connector for the Ably LiveSync product. Ably LiveSync enables you to seamlessly fan-out your MongoDB Atlas state to billions of clients in realtime - ensuring reliable, low-latency delivery of your document data.

When you publish a message to Ably Pub/Sub, you can be confident that the message will be delivered to subscribing clients, wherever they are in the world. Ably is fast: we have a 99th percentile transmit latency of <50ms from any of our 635 global PoPs, that receive at least 1% of our global traffic. But being fast isn’t enough; Ably is also dependable and scalable. Ably doesn’t sacrifice data integrity for speed or scale; it’s fast and safe.

This is one of a series of posts that explain Ably’s four pillars of dependability. The four pillars project at Ably is about making concrete, objectively verifiable, statements about the technical characteristics of the service. We aim to ensure that our claims about service performance are expressed clearly in terms of explicit metrics, and we explain in technical terms how those performance levels are met.