Popular Mobile Photo App Chooses Heroku
PicCollage is a fast and fun way to create and share photo collages on mobile devices. It was launched in July 2011 for iPhone/iPad, and was downloaded over 3 million times in its first six months. PicCollage has increased steadily in popularity in the highly competitive photo category, where it is a Top Ten Photo app in the US, Japan and many countries around the world.
The team at PicCollage wants to inspire users everyday with their apps instead of managing servers. That’s why they trust Heroku to keep everything up and running. The easy deployment process and powerful add-ons enable them to rapidly iterate the functionality of PicCollage in order to make it both useful and fun.
Continuous Deployment Made Simple
PicCollage CEO John Fan chose Heroku so they could deploy, iterate and add features frequently to their mobile apps and previous Facebook apps.
Prior to discovering Heroku, the team had set up a system involving Capistrano script-based deployment directly to EC2. “ My team was getting mired in script development and maintenance,” says Fan. “We’d rather spend our time actually building a fun app to use.” Switching to Heroku’s git-based deployment eased this pain, giving them near zero-touch deployment for their apps. The team continuously built new features and could push them or roll them back with one simple Heroku command.
“Heroku allows us to get in the flow of consistently launching new features. At no point does managing our infrastructure get in the way of building what our users want.”
Scaling without the Headaches
Fan and his team knew they could trust in Heroku’s scaling capabilities from some of their former successes with Facebook apps. Their first app on Heroku was Tribute Balloon, which reached a million users on Facebook within a week of launching, and their Quiz Creator platform saw peaks of over 10,000 requests per minute at its peak. By utilizing Heroku’s database sizing, dyno control, as well as the memcache and NewRelic add-ons, they could get optimal performance without taking their focus off building great software.
“Handling this many users typically presents architectural challenges," says Fan. “The Heroku platform incorporates a lot of best practices for these situations, making it easy for us to scale our servers and make them robust. In particular, for the millions of users of PicCollage, it’s been especially important to have fast response time since users are often accessing through an unreliable wireless link. Heroku has been a great choice for our mobile app!”
To download PicCollage and create your own photo collages, please visit the PicCollage website.
About PicCollage
PicCollage is an app for the iPhone and iPad that allows users to easily create fun photo collages. Within six month of launching, PicCollage has reached 3 million downloads and is a Top Ten photo app in the iTunes App Store in the U.S., Japan and many other countries. PicCollage is developed by Cardinal Blue, a web and mobile development company based in Mountain View and Taipei. Previously, Cardinal Blue has built social apps on Facebook with millions of users.