iPhone/Android Apps Were in Slow Mo' During Election Due 2 Old Protocols

Yesterday, many mobile app users noticed that their apps couldn’t keep track of the election.

The push notifications that alert to breaking news  were reportedly  late – some as late as 90 minutes.

There were also problems reported with the Romney campaign poll watchers app. The ORCA Project was supposed to give real-time information to enable campaign workers to contact those who had not voted, yet. Romney campaigners griped on Twitter during the day.  Many workers Tweeted that could not login and the system was overloaded.

The heart of the late news problem was not that news organizations were slow to post election wins online.  Twitter for example saw record activity.  The real problem according to Kaazing was that smartphones apps are built on old web architecture.

So when there was a big news story to push out – like Barack Obama winning Wisconsin – the information would take an hour to come from new providers to a push notification on your phone.

Jonas Jacobi, the CEO of Kaazing, said "The use, or I should say the lack of use, of modern Web technology to deliver live real-time information about an election to the people of the United States of America in 2012, the most powerful nation in the World, is embarrassing. In addition, the top media outlets are using Flash-based solutions when most, if not all, smartphones and tablets are not supporting this technology.

 This is important.  According to SOASTA, an app testing company, a majority of Americans (61%) admitted they will rely on mobile apps and websites over traditional newspapers and TV this year, with 34% of them relying on apps for breaking news, 23% of them relying on apps for the presidential election results and 16 for local election results.

Kaazing notes most iPhone apps rely on using the earliest architecture of the Internet – HTTP, which wasn’t designed for the real-time responsiveness.  By providing an HTML 5 WebSocket platform, Kaazing enables the fastest, most reliable, mobile Living Web experience possible.