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PacketZoom — Increase your app's download speeds by 2-10x, now on Android
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I've known about PacketZoom for over a year now. They have a GREAT team and I'm really impressed to see how far they have come. Happy to see them on product hunt!
Hi Product Hunters! We've been busy building and refining our tech and are very proud to bring you PacketZoom Android SDK.
What we offer is a protocol- based service that can dramatically speed up content delivered to a mobile device, and also enables seamless downloads as users move between networks.
What we've seen so far is if you have a single origin server and drop in our SDK, you see a very high multiple in the download speed. If you are doing everything possible (army of performance engineers on your team, multiple CDNs strategy with a mediation layer tuned for performance, etc), then you'll see ~ 2x speedups.
We can work with any CDN that you might already have in place, so you don't have to change your server side architecture at all.
In addition to the raw speed, I mentioned seamless downloads. What I mean by this is if you start a download of content and then move between networks (wifi to LTE, 4G to 3G, or go through a deadzone and reconnect) the typical experience is that the download fails and the user has to re-request the content. With PacketZoom, the download just continues. This has proven to be extremely important in areas with spotty network conditions.
If you have any questions, ask away. It would be great if you could take either our Android or iOS SDK for a spin and give us some feed back. I'd love to hear what the Mobile devs who are Product Hunters think about what we've built.
We also have Unity3D plugins for both Android and iOS for those of you who are using Unity.
I forgot to mention - special deal for Product Hunters today. 500 extra free users for Product Hunters who sign up.
For those who don't like to read the walls of text I put up earlier, here are 7 bullets:
- 2-10x faster download speed for mobile apps
- users can move between networks and the download just continues
- no change to your server side required
- if you have a CDN, PacketZoom will mean less users hit them (replacement cost in some sense)
- if you don't have a CDN, you'll find you may not need one.
- integration is ez-pz
- Android and iOS support
I am damn excited to try this out. We are using Parse.com as the backend will your platform integrate with them or have you built it up with Google Cloud Platform or AWS in mind..? Happy to give this a try. Sounds a win-win to the users and the developers to me.! Cheers ;)
@h_halvi We don't really care about the origin backend where the app assets are hosted as long as it's accessible via HTTP. Our proxy server will simply make HTTP requests to your server backend the first time that request is made from the client side. The assets will be cached (if they're cacheable as per HTTP headers) for future requests.
"Do the packets actually make a zoom sound?" https://dashboard.packetzoom.com...
Well, do they?!
I love this product because A) I'm an Android user myself and it was getting annoying to see only iOS apps take advantage of the PacketZoom speedups and B) I'm the CEO/founder of the company therefore can be expected to show some bias ;-)
Nice work @johnpjoseph & co! My co-maker @raduamarie and I are curious about how you compare with Akamai's SDK. It seems at first glance that the big advantage here is for smaller startups that are more self-reliant for content distribution than, say, a big video aggregator. PacketZoom seems to be a great weapon in a guerrilla arsenal. How well does it scale globally?
@paulrobertcary @raduamarie Thanks Paul! We've had customers run us in controlled A/B tests against various CDN configurations (including Akamai) and have seen very good results. I mention above that one public company customer who is very focused on performance is using a multi-cdn system with a mediation layer tuned for performance. We saw an average 2x improvement across all network types in their own tests.
Another customer who is a smaller team (~ 15 people) who are using a CDN, but don't really have any performance people on their team dropped in PacketZoom and saw 6x improvements vs their CDN.
Customers that don't currently have CDNs see massive improvements around 10x because they get the advantage of both our super fast protocol as well as our backend which acts as a proxy/cache globally.
Re. scaling globally - we are already there :) Our backend is on a combination of multiple public and private clouds, and we currently serve end users in pretty much every country.
The reason we win over CDNs is because of our approach. Generally, a CDNs only weapon is to move physically closer to users. We win in the last mobile mile, which is by far the longest part of a mobile request, by using the available bandwidth much more efficiently than TCP.
@johnpjoseph Sounds awesome - would love to talk more as we put our content delivery strategy into place. cc: @raduamarie When you get a breather, have a look at our site - I'm curious about content load times.
Hey @paulrobertcary @raduamarie, I was looking at your site and it looks like you're building an interesting app! If you send us a build we can show you how PacketZoom performs in it...
@patkennardpz @johnpjoseph thanks guys. We are building our alpha iOS and Android apps in React Native, so as soon as we have something that's workable we'll let you know.
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