Today’s guest blog comes from John Song, Senior Director of Cloud Computing at HTC, a leading smartphone and tablet manufacturer.





Who hasn’t seen a mobile app freeze when going into a tunnel or underground subway? Whether you’re working on a proposal to send your boss or mastering the final level of Candy Crush, losing access to the app leads to frustration and aggravation — not only with the task but also with the app. In an increasingly mobile world, people expect instant and uninterrupted access to data and apps, but often they face two issues when using apps on their mobile devices: reliability and bandwidth. Plus in countries where bandwidth is costly, reducing data use is important.





At HTC, we strive to create a better user experience within the mobile apps we build, such as HTC Gallery , Zoe and One M9 Photo Editor . To help improve the reliability and cut bandwidth, we turned to Google Cloud Platform as our all-in-one solution. In fact, we built a new mobile app framework on Google Cloud Platform that will allow us to build more apps in the future, faster. A combination of tools — from Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage to Google Cloud Datastore — allows us to create a better user experience and free up developers’ time to build better features.





To address the issue of disconnectivity and bandwidth usage, we relied on Cloud Datastore’s data synchronization feature. When data is updated, the One Gallery app sends only the changes, rather than the whole data packet. This means users can still access data that loaded prior to any interruptions in connectivity. For example, One M9 Photo Editor users who are adding double exposure and other visual effects to a photo can still be editing photos when they’re disconnected from the network. Once they regain connectivity, the app will simply fetch the latest changes.





A stable network connection is not just key to good end user experience, but it’s also vital for software development and debugging code. With Google Cloud Platform’s stable network, our developers don’t have to deal with latency and can build products that deliver a high-quality user experience. For example, uploading 10,000 photos via the HTC Gallery app won’t put the app “to sleep” or slow it down significantly. Also, having a stable network allows developers to design scrolling image pages rather than placing photos on separate pages.





Since Google’s backend is stable, our developers can devote their energy to building better features rather than fixing bugs due to low latency. Our backend has had zero downtime since we adopted Google Cloud Platform. As we build more apps and increase our customer base, we don’t have to worry about partitioning data or adding more databases because Compute Engine autoscales.





We’ve saved 40 percent in IT costs, and we’re also saving money by using Google Cloud Messaging for Android and Google BigQuery . We were considering building tools internally, but now we save time, money and resources by using Google Cloud Platform products.





With Google Cloud Platform, we’re able to focus on developing new mobile apps and features that offer a rich and seamless user experience, all built on a reliable network.





- Posted by John Song, Senior Director of Cloud Computing, HTC