When it comes to texting, users are now accustomed to
myriad of features, and the current messaging apps no
longer fit in. Drizzle is a suite of apps for iOS and Android
that pays a user to text. It does so by serving non-intrusive
advertisements to their users. Each advertisement that a
user sees creates a drop, and more drops a user receives
the more they can cash-in.
“Simform made their developers available to us full time, with dedicated access to their project managers as well. They were even willing to work the occasional weekend to hit a deadline. All in all a great experience.”
Layer is a great platform to build Chat/SMS apps, but it is quite rigid in terms of customization.
The app has to co-ordinate between online and offline synchronization, which is pretty complicated in this case.
A text chat is single threaded, which makes implementing reactions extremely difficult.
We utilized Layer’s powerful platform to establish a communication channel that runs over top of TCP/IP as opposed to traditional telephony networks.
We managed and wrote the messaging activities to define clear rules of how the app would behave if it has been selected as the default messaging app, and when it wasn’t. Upon being selected as the default SMS app for the operating system, the SMS is prevented from being written to the SMS provider.
This implementation was challenging due to the single threaded nature of SMS app. We added preferential delivery to prevent this single threaded system from becoming slow and collapsing - Text messages gets preference over reactions.
When a SMS or MMS is received in absence of internet connectivity, it is delivered to the native SMS text application and get stored into a local database. Whenever internet connectivity is available, the SMS or MMS is then synced into the Layer server DB.
While layer satisfied most of the app’s requirement as a messaging infrastructure, it lacked certain features like “last seen”. We customized layer and built the new functionalities using node.js.
Having more than 4000-5000 messages per profile, we implemented an optimized text-searching functionality, and took care of scrolling issues that comes with increased messages.
When the app was launched, within the first week it received more than 10,000 downloads, and has a very high user retention. Upon validating their hypothesis, they successfully raised more than $1 Million to further carryout product operations and acquire more users.
