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I am working on a family networking app for Android that enables family members to share their location and track location of others simultaneously. You can suppose that this app is similar with Life360 or Sygic Family Locator. At first, I determined to use a MBaaS and then I completed its coding by using Parse. However, I realized that although a user read and write geolocation data per minute (of course, in some cases geolocation data is sent less frequently), the request traffic exceeds my forward-looking expectations. For this reason, I want to develop a well-grounded system but I have some doubts about whether Parse can still do its duty if number of users increases to 100-500k.

Considering all these, I am looking for an alternative method/service to set such a system. I think using a backend service like Parse is a moderate solution but not the best one. What are the possible ways to achieve this from bad to good? To exemplify, one of my friends say that I can use Sinch which is an instant messaging service in background between users that set the price considering number of active users. Nevertheless, it sounds weird to me, I have never seen such a usage of an instant messaging service as he said.

Your comments and suggestions will be highly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

cjensen
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Dorukhan Arslan
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  • Voting it down since its to broad and is asking general advice on pricing. and opinionated responses. – cjensen Aug 31 '15 at 19:59
  • Yay, it may be too broad but I just asked a valid method to handle the traffic. I did not emphasize on the pricing. The important thing to know here is whether Sinch's insant messaging service can be used as described above and is there any better solution than using a MBaaS for such an app. A few sentences would satisfy me. Btw, I did not ask anything about pricing but there is no rule that says users should not send questions about pricing of services so far as I know. Anyway... Your thought to vote this down is reasonable, I know it is not a good question but I need help. Thanks. – Dorukhan Arslan Aug 31 '15 at 21:23

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Well sinch wouldn't handle location updates or storing of location data, that would be parse you are asking about.

And since you implied that the requests would be to much for your username maybe I wrongly assumed price was the problem with parse.

But to answer your question about sending location data I would probably throttle it if I where you to aile or so. No need for family members to know down to the feet in realtime. if there is a need for that I would probably inement a request method instead and ask the user for location when someone is interested.

cjensen
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  • Yay, my approach looks like you described but I am searching a way of tracking geolocation data without using periodic push notifications or polling. Thus, instead of saving and reading the data for each minute, using an instant messaging service in background to send and receive latitude/longitude data sounds interesting. All in all, I am curious about after both users confirmed to track each other, whether such an background service (depends on instant messaging) can be an alternative way to handle location updates for this app or not. Thank you for your answer again. – Dorukhan Arslan Sep 03 '15 at 23:42
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    you could do content push for that (no need for a IM service) – cjensen Sep 04 '15 at 22:23