Mobile Apps en Lisbon
How we work in Lisbon
The app does not go down, what is behind it does
The user sees a blank screen, uninstalls, and writes in the store that the application does not work. The fault was in the server, but the app takes the reputational hit and the review stays there for months. So we design what each screen shows when no answer arrives: the data from last time, a clear notice and a button to try again.
A notification to everyone at once is a spike you create yourselves
Pushing an alert to the whole user base makes a sizeable share of them open the application in the same minute. It is the sharpest spike your system will face and you are the one firing it. The send is staggered in batches and you watch what happens to the first one before releasing the second.
The automatic retry can be the second blow
If the API is slow and thousands of applications ask again at the same time, the retry finishes off whatever was still standing. The answer is not to stop retrying: it is to wait longer between attempts and add a random offset so they do not all come back together. It is a few lines of code and it stops a passing problem becoming a long outage.
The old version is still installed, and still calling
You cannot force anyone to update. Months after launch there will be people on old versions asking the same API for data, so it is versioned from the start and breaking changes are planned with an overlap period. Ignoring it works until the first big update, and then the problem belongs to everyone at once.
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