A bit about me • Ivan Čuljak • Cloud Solutions Architect @ Celeste Maze • Shouting at clouds since 2012??? • Salvaging wrecks/putting out fires for a living • Freelancer & Azure MVP
Evolution of "app hosting" [2/2] • VMs running containers • containers orchestrator running on top of VMs • let's just forget it's all there and do our dev job...
UX/CX is crucial [1/2] • Spend as much time as you need to polish it • UX on a chatbot is more important than UX in mobile apps • It's hard for users to use their intuition to guess where you've hidden something
Time • Initial time to market is lower • Time required for any change is lower • Deployments are available right away • There's no procedure for users to update
Support • Your app not working on some random Chinese phone/ tablet isn't your problem • If a user can't get it working it means that the messenger isn't working on their device • You can easily debug what's going on in each conversation • You can support multiple messengers
Development • No special hardware required • No special subscriptions/licences required • You can handle almost everything from something like Visual Studio Code
Testing • You can run tests on your dev machine, instead of automating them over a farm of mobile phones • If it works on one iPhone it will work on all of them • If it works on one Android it will work on most of them
Deployment • There is no in-house/ad-hoc/enterprise/hidden builds/ deployments • There's no need to download anything on the client side (except the messenger) • You basically deploy a web app if you're coding it, or you hit the save button if you're using some visual dev tool
Analytics • All the analytics come from your backend, and hence you can easily collect them • There's no mobile app crash analytics that won't get to you, and hence you might miss them
Fish app • Their MVP was based on WhatsApp... manually typing WhatsApp • Their budget was too small to build anything serious • Yet they were convinced they really need a mobile app for Android and iOS
Checking codes app • Someone can register on a web site and get a code to redeem a package • Packages are being handed out by students • Students are using their own mobile phones • Viber to the rescue
Getting a loan pre-approval • Chat with a bank bot to go through the loan questionaire • Get a pre-approval • Runs on functions • Cold starts and scaling "penalties" don't seem to matter to chat users :)
Various startups • If you can think out-of-the-box • If you can "shift" the way society made you think • You could figure out that chatbots & serverless may solve your needs... at least for an MVP