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I live in Sub Saharan Africa, Where mobile data speed are very low. But Among all the apps on my phone, the app that always seems to load content even when others can't is the Twitter Android App.

I would like to know what technology they use to make it possible and what format they use for data transfer from their Server to their android app.

Tope Omotunde
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  • Did you checked [Twitter Developer Page](https://dev.twitter.com/) ? – mgokgoz Oct 05 '15 at 10:49
  • Yes I did, for their public api, they use JSON but I will be surprise if that is what they use internally. As I said, even on very low connections, twitter app works. – Tope Omotunde Oct 05 '15 at 10:51
  • They probably use private API for their internal application development but I don't think their formats differ so much. Network analyzer tool like Wireshark might catch these kind of info but I never used such a thing so might be wrong. – mgokgoz Oct 05 '15 at 10:56

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Twitter has a REST API that when requested returns data in JSON format. However, this has little to do with its speed because the multimedia data embedded in the tweets do not come along with the JSON. It's just like the web; how fast the html page has loaded has little to do with how fast the overall page loads in the browser.

The speed you see is because Twitter, like any other big conglomerate, has invested in content delivery networks. Load any Twitter profile in your browser and you'll see several calls made to *.twimg.com servers.

This is where Twitter has all of their static content like images and videos stored. The CDN servers are spread all around the world (at strategic geo locations) to make sure every user experiences as low a latency as possible by fetching these resources from the nearest server node possible.

Ravi K Thapliyal
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