Twilio has announced Twilio Sync: an API solution to keep real-time applications synced across devices and between users. Scaling synchronization remains a continuous challenge as the economy of real-time apps continues to grow. Twilio has addressed the problem by providing API access to a backend state synchronization infrastructure. In turn, developers can focus on app features and rely on Twilio for syncing needs.
"All modern applications are real-time applications," Patrick Malatack, Twilio Vice President of Product, commented in a press release. "With Twilio Sync, Twilio takes care of the real-time infrastructure so that developers can build the apps their customers want with less effort and less cost."
Today's mobile user expects real-time synchronization. The user expects an app to remain updated whether accessed on a mobile device, or the Web. Further, the user expects to know which friends are online, idle, and offline. The demands go on, and such demands require millisecond-level state synchronization across platforms and apps. The only scalable way to achieve such capability is to maintain the synchronization architecture in the cloud. Twilio Sync maintains a single source of state in the cloud, which it can easily integrate with third party apps via an API with a few lines of code.
App experiences enabled by Twilio Sync include seamless app experiences across platforms, user availability and presence features, and remote collaboration (e.g. co-browse and co-edit functionality). Sync can work as a stand alone state management system or in connection with Twilio Programmable Voice, Video, IP Messaging, and other Twilio products. Sync is currently under developer preview. Request access here.
