The 2016 Summer Olympics will take place in Rio de Janerio, Brazil and the mobile app market will be following the crowds who flow into the city to watch the games and participate in festivities. This means that mobile developers will be scrambling to keep up with the increased demand, but at the same time will face challenges presented by the needs of mobile users and Rio’s telecommunications infrastructure.

The mobile turnout for the 2016 Olympics is expected to be the largest one yet with estimates placing expectations at 50 percent higher than the last Summer Olympics held in London 2012. According to Embratel (Claro S.A. part of América Móvil), a major Brazilian telecommunications company headquartered in Rio de Janerio, 27 voice calls will be made and 3 million SMS messages will be sent during the competitions. Much of the data is expected to be used by photos and video posts by videos across the 3G/4G network already in place.

During the 2014 FIFA World Cup, which also took place in Brazil, total data traffic reached a record-breaking 26.7 terabytes using 4G infrastructure built specifically to host mobile for that event. Embratel and Claro plan to implement 180 mobile stations and 40 dedicated coverage stations. Cisco Systems, Inc., also a sponsor of the 2016 Olympics, is responsible for the events 358-kilometer fiber optic network and will be providing free Wi-Fi in 60 Olympic facilities, 7,000 Wi-Fi access points, and 100,000 LAN portal networks.

Even with all of this infrastructure and work, it is still expected that there will be coverage outages, low bandwidth and other frustrations for users and developers alike. Keep reading for some tips on how to build apps designed to be used at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

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Building apps to anticipate needs during the 2016 Summer Olympics

To get an idea of what developers can expect, SiliconANGLE asked Nexmo, Inc., a global cloud telecomm leader and provider of APIs and SDKs for mobile.

“If you are looking to launch a chat app or telecom service within Brazil for the Olympics or beyond, it’s worth looking into global solution. In addition, something quite serious to consider is that some of these tools are legal while others are not,” said David Vigar, Director of Carrier Relations at Nexmo.

Nexmo provides a set of tools that relieve or ease tension around problems that will arise due to disrupted or slow connectivity.

According to Nexmo Head of Developer Relations Phil Leggetter connectivity may not be guaranteed and this means that developers need to prepare apps that are resilient to drop outs or slow data. This means building web apps and native apps with offline capability in mind.

This is provided in mobile apps by implementing caching and updating mechanisms that pre-cache information on the phone, allow an offline mode for manipulating and accessing information on device and synchronizing when connectivity is available. To do this, mobile libraries provide SDKs that flag when a device is offline so an app can behave differently such as in this framework tutorial from Telerik (Progress Software Corporation), an application framework developer for mobile and desktop.

Apps need to be able to “catch up” with missed information or unsent messages when connectivity becomes unstable, slows down or simply drops. Leggetter uses Nexmo as an example noting that its service will make retry attempts when sending SMS every minute for 72 hours. Developers using the Nexmo SDK and service have this sort of retry setup build-in to the library and it will try its best to handle offline modes and get users updated when connectivity comes back.

Infrastructure and carrier concerns also come into play when it comes to developing an app that uses SMS or voice. In any given situation, it’s hard to know if the carrier will maximize chances that any given SMS message or voice call will get through. To solve this, Nexmo provides a method for monitoring carrier status and quality with the ability to adapt carrier routes to increase those chances. To do this, Nexmo developed its Adaptive Routing algorithm accessible via the Conversion API on its platform.

Finally, Leggetter adds that monitoring of connectivity is tantamount when sending and receiving SMS messages and voice calls for reasons already addressed above but additionally because it allows developers to build apps that can adapt to changing network integrity. Once again, Nexmo’s Conversion API comes into play by providing high-quality information about delivery and delivery receipts (in JSON or XML) authenticating the sent message. To do this, Nexmo uses small amounts of data sent over the carrier network to constantly monitor its health, thereby providing information to the app as to network health and environment.

The DevOps Angle for mobile at the 2016 Summer Olympics

Once mobile apps for the 2016 Olympics are in the hands of consumers DevOps teams will be spending a lot of time making sure that the app communication with servers themselves. Teams will also monitor performance of the mobile apps while they’re in use and all of this may add data that will further congest communications.

The balance will be to provide enough monitoring to capably patch apps to provide superior performance without degrading the experience of the users who will already be facing network issues.

Already, businesses will want that monitoring data as much as they want the user experience to be good.

As Tammy Everts, Senior Researcher and Evangelist at SOASTA Inc., said about mobile monitoring, “Today’s real user monitoring tools let business owners understand how mobile users are interacting with their sites and mobile apps across a huge swath of metrics: bounce rate, session length, conversion rate, location, network connection, operating system, ISP, and more… We’re going to see business owners embrace mobile performance measurement and testing, and then harness the power of their user data to develop better mobile experiences.”

By using a library and service such as provided by Nexmo, that can anticipate and adapt to changing network conditions, DevOps teams will have less headaches to deal with during outages and users will have a better experience.

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