Recently, the mobile last mile acceleration company PacketZoom worked with Photofy, a content creation and photo editing app, to improve its speed and limit session interruptions. During A/B testing, Photofy rescued 63% of transfer disconnects and yielded speeds that were between 1.46 and 1.76 times faster.
Prior to meeting with PacketZoom, Photofy CTO Chris Keenan was using Amazon Cloudfront, but had been on the lookout for a mobile-first solution to improve asset download times for both dynamic and static content. “Photofy is an image-driven, visual experience. We can’t allow unreliable network conditions to compromise our user experience, and we are always on the lookout for the latest tech to enhance our product,” said Keenan.
Photofy completed the SDK integration in less than an hour. The SDK offers a drag and drop integration that requires no changes to infrastructure configuration and no additional hardware or software. The existing CDN infrastructure was kept, and Photofy was granted full operational monitoring and control via the dashboard, allowing the team to conduct A/B tests and compare performance with and without PacketZoom.
Photofy ran 1.76 times faster across LTE, 1.52 times faster on 3G, and 1.46 times faster on WiFi networks. PacketZoom also rescued 63% of transfers from disconnections. Photofy saw an immediate ROI and significant boost in user engagement, including a 10% increase In image views.
Like most mobile apps, Photofy’s app was experiencing session disconnects that were disruptive to the user experience. The percentage of session disconnects across markets where Photofy has a presence aligned with statistics collected and presented in the PacketZoom Mobile Observatory.
- US (~150% improvement) had 4.6% sessions with transfer failures. With PacketZoom the failed transfer rate dropped to 2.2%.
- Brazil (275% improvement) had 11% sessions with transfer failures, which dropped to 4%.
- Canada (171% improvement) had 5.5% sessions with transfer failures, which dropped to 3.2%.
- Mexico (208% improvement) had 7.1% sessions with transfer failures, which dropped to 3.4%.
Positioned as a CDN enhancing technology, PacketZoom automatically offloaded mobile content caching from Photofy’s CDN. PacketZoom delivered about 94% of the static content request from its caches (client and server), and the remaining was served from the Amazon CloudFront. This translated into savings that result in close to a zero-cost increment for Photofy.