Having a Website & App in sync (not the band)

Hi UX Mastery readers :slight_smile:

I’m new to UX and UI, like really new! :(. My question is regarding synchronizing a mobile app, both, Android and iOS, with a website. Say for example you’re viewing Facebook on your mobile, most of the time on the bog (toilet), you leave someone a post or create an event, then you go back to a desktop website and check the notifications, how quickly can you have the data synchronized?

At this moment in time, the project that I’m working on I’m not too sure how much data I will be processing, certainly not as much as Facebook ;). Assume I have 100,000 profiles which contain several images, short videos, and descriptions with a history of saving conversations and account history between profiles, similar to that of a timeline. What time frame am I looking at for the profiles to be able to synchronize between one another?

Thank you for your time reading this and I look forward to your comments.
Apologies if I make no sense.

Hi OjSqueeze, welcome to the world of UX!

I’ve not ever built (coded) an app like that myself, but I have designed apps that included social elements across multiple platforms—in-app messaging, online accounts, and website profile access. In those cases the development team were the ones to solve the technical solutions, create the database structure and optimise the overheads. I collaborated to help focus the data for certain screens, but otherwise didn’t have much to do with the actual database design and coding. I would recommend that you get a good database designer involved (not everyone is good at this) otherwise, scaling up a badly designed system if/when you get higher traffic will cause some serious headaches.

To answer your question, I would assume that (with the right infrastructural resources) any delay between platforms and profiles would be pretty minimal. Surely the point of social interactions is for them to be close to real time? Crossloading large amounts of data (photos/videos/etc) might take a bit longer, but people would probably expect that to be on par with their Internet upload/download speeds.

Does that help at all? Let me know some more specific questions too.