How Onedio took an award-winning HQ-trivia app to market in just 21 days

When Onedio set out to bring an HQ-trivia app – Oyna Kazan – to market, it set itself some ambitious targets. It wanted to slash development time, bringing the product to market within a month, and it wanted to attract a million concurrent users in its first go-to-market phase.

But building an interactive trivia quiz app and video streaming experience is no simple task, in particular putting exacting demands on realtime infrastructure:

• Low-latency is mission-critical for HQ apps. If questions are sent or answers received outside of the allotted timeframe the information loses its value. Even slight increases in latency leaves users frustrated – so Onedio’s developers needed to enable instant communications within the quiz’s short time-bursts of eight seconds, no matter how large, varied and unpredictable the number of players answering multiple-choice questions.

• Burstability would be key to Oyna Kazan’s UX. The app needed to handle dramatic expansions and contractions in active online users (from zero to 1,000,000 in less than 10 seconds, in line with Onedio's growth ambitions) smoothly, with zero-impact on system capacity.

• Effective integration with Amazon SQS and AWS would be crucial to the app’s ability to queue data before processing and thereby solve a classic HQ app problem – not just fanning the data out in realtime but also funnelling data back to SQS within 65ms.

With these challenges in mind, and with a desire to focus its own developers on core app functionality, Onedio set out to find a realtime infrastructure provider that could not only meet these demands, but also do so in a very short timeframe.

The team’s investigations quickly led it to Ably, with initial conversations during the scoping out stage confirming that Ably’s infrastructure was able to support both Onedio’s current requirements and its future ambitions for Oyna Kazan.

First, the breadth of Ably’s available features would cater for Onedio’s ambition to quickly attract one million simultaneous players, rolling out the app across Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Russia, while its developers were impressed by the clarity of documentation, which allowed them to understand the suitability of the product from the start. 

Crucially, with realtime such an integral feature of the app, Ably promised to significantly accelerate the product’s time to market – a promise it lived up to according to Onedio product manager, Mehmet Burak Arığ: “The integration process was smooth and easy. We benefited from helpful and informative customer service, good documentation and readily available answers to all the questions we had. This helped get our product to market super-fast.”

Ably provided Onedio with the readymade infrastructure it needed to power Oyna Kazan to instant success – reducing the operational engineering burden and allowing Onedio to focus all efforts on its product. The decision played a key role in getting the app to market in just 21 days – a significant improvement on the four-to-five month average for HQ apps.  

That speed did not come at the expense of quality. Just three weeks after its launch, Onya Kazan was already attracting 300,000 regular players and 500,000 or more for bigger events, and went on to be named Google Play Best of 2019 Turkey Winner in Users’ Choice and Fun categories just a few months later.

Along way, Ably provided elegant solutions to all of Onedio’s realtime challenges – to underpin a fast, reliable and scalable user experience:

• Ably’s infrastructure ensured that, within the required eight second time-frame, questions could be sent out and displayed on users’ devices synchronously, transmitted back to Onedio’s servers for processing and then back to end-user devices, with each of these connections taking place with sub-65ms latency. 

• Engineered for elastic scale, Ably’s network seamlessly enabled data transfer between the app’s servers and large numbers of users – coping effortlessly with unpredictable loads.

• Integration with elastic queuing made it possible to build pipelines using Amazon SQS and AWS to queue data before processing – ensuring the app could react to published events within milliseconds before triggering events or streaming data to Amazon SQS. As a result, Oyna Kazan can effortlessly fan data out in realtime but also funnel it back to SQS within 65ms. 

• Leaving Ably to handle data transfer between endpoints created efficiencies - Onedio only needs to publish questions once, regardless of the number of end-users, and can rely on customers submitting answers back to the Amazon SQS queue through the persistent connection held between Ably and mobile devices. This has played a key role in ensuring the app is growth-ready, able to deal with dramatic expansions and contractions in active online users (from zero to 1,000,000 in less than 10 seconds), without any impact on system capacity.

• Ably’s connection state recovery feature mitigates the user experience impact of playing Onya Kazan over unreliable internet connections, by ensuring players are seamlessly reconnected after internet connection dropouts.

The impact of these realtime features, solutions and support on the success of Onya Kazan is not lost on Burak Arığ, who said: “Ably’s infrastructure entirely alleviated the difficult burden of having to build our own data stream system. Our developers were able to get the app’s realtime data transfer infrastructure up and running quickly and without fuss, and could therefore immediately concentrate on innovations to build on the app’s popularity while the product was still fresh and new.”