How we optimize Jongla messages for your mobile phone
We put a lot of effort into making our service platform and device independent so we decided to write a blog post highlighting a lot of cool stuff we do behind the scenes.
We chose to deliver Jongla messages using SMS because it's the best supported messaging system across all devices. How do we deliver multimedia content via SMS, you ask? Well, we don't. When you receive a Jongla message it comes by SMS, but includes a URL. When you click it, your mobile device will open the default browser. Before you see any web page on the screen, some really cool magic happens behind the scenes (in mere milliseconds).
Before our server sends you any response, we try to detect your mobile device. All mobile devices supply a small piece of information to web servers, identifying the maker and/or other device information. We use that information and, using our huge device database, we select the optimal resolution, supported video and image formats. After this we create a custom version of the message HTML page containing images, links and videos that will work best on your device.
Simple example would be somebody sending a regular DVD quality video to his friends using Jongla service. Let's, for the sake of example, assume one of the friends has a low-end device and another has an iPhone. Once the video arrives on our servers, we start the process of converting it to many different formats. As soon as the encoding is over (which usually takes very little time) we send out SMS messages to recipients with link to the message. The low-end device owner will see a message that looks good on his device (size of thumbnails, etc) and when he presses "Download video", he will get the video in 3GP format. The iPhone user, on the other hand, will see a message that looks good on his device and the video will be presented to him in MP4 format with higher resolution and better sound quality.
This is why we believe we deliver true platform independent experience on mobile devices.
Not all mobiles are created equally
There are a LOT of mobile phones available on the market, ranging from $10 low-end devices to top of the line smart phones which will cost you an arm and a leg. At Jongla we wanted to support as many as possible, if not all devices, but we had a problem. What do we do when a user sends an HD video to a friend, whose mobile device only supports low-end video formats like 3GP? The screen size is another issue altogether. There are a lot of different screen sizes when it comes to mobiles, so if you want to optimize visual experience for every single device, you have a lot of work ahead of you.Tackling the problem head on
Many smart phone chat solutions decided to ignore this issue altogether letting device handle the situation the best it can. This in many cases results in unplayable videos. Other software vendors also make their lives a lot easier by only supporting high-end smart phones capable of playing back almost any format. Video has always been Achilles’ heel for many chatting/messaging applications. Allowing clients to send large video files requires a lot of bandwidth and hard drive space. Another issue is supporting many devices, which requires you to re-encode the video in many different formats. This in turn requires you to have a lot of processing power at your disposal. If you decide to only support smart phones and only deliver messages via native application then you don't have to worry about optimizing experience for many different screen sizes. Of course in return you force your users to install your application in order to view the message.How we do it
Right from the get go, we had two objectives: supporting as many devices as humanly possible, and not forcing our users into installing anything in order to view messages.
