Is Pokémon Go the Biggest Mobile App in U.S. History?

You have witnessed the hype; you have seen addicted users playing it on their smartphones while meandering from place to place engaging with one another. Chances are you are playing it right now. Unless you are living under a rock you know I’m referring to Pokémon Go, the location-based game from Niantic currently sweeping the nation. The game is bringing users out into the world from their homes in record numbers. As of July 26^th 2016, the game has been downloaded 75 million times worldwide and generated more than $75 million in revenue from in-game purchases. The average daily usage of the app on Android devices in July exceeded Snapchat, Tinder, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Pokémon Go reported a 2.1% boost in usage over Candy Crush putting them on pace to becoming the biggest mobile app in U.S. history.

What does Pokémon Go have to do with ScaleMatrix? Pokémon Go uses a lot of data; some users are playing so much they are using up to 20 GB of data. Where is this data stored? While Pokémon Go is not using the hybrid services ScaleMatrix has to offer, their data is being hosted in a different data center. Due to the large amount of traffic after the launch, their servers crashed and were down for a few days causing mass hysteria among the users. The servers were unable to handle the fast user growth and began migrating small databases one at a time after the user base grew. Here is where ScaleMatrix comes in— at ScaleMatrix we are prepared to handle massive traffic bursts from an app such as Pokémon Go. If you have an app that bursts like Pokémon Go, which of our services would be the right product? ScaleFlex is our instance-based, hourly-billed cloud computing service which provides users the ability to spin up a variety of pre-established and variable capacity cloud instances on demand. Rather than migrate small databases at a time, ScaleFlex would allow your app to spin up more resources as the user base grows. ScaleFlex works better from a development standpoint; therefore the plan would be to start your app in ScaleFlex, since it has a better understanding of the workload. With ScaleFlex, you would be able to spin up huge environments before moving to ScaleCloud, which is a more stable environment. In fact, ScaleFlex would be able to handle Pokémon Go’s workload! Take a closer look at ScaleFlex by clicking this link. For fun, did you know that ScaleMatrix has a PokéStop in our lobby? Come in for a tour, pick up some extra Poké balls, and catch the Pokémon.