You should know a product is successful when it’s either referred to as a reference or is simply copied by others. For instance, every ride-hailing app- even the ones as popular as Lyft, are often called “ride booking app like Uber”. For hospitality, it’s Airbnb and for the real-time quiz, it’s none other than HQ Trivia. Boasting of tens of millions and downloads and millions of concurrent users at special events, the app has singlehandedly shaped the entire trivia category in mobile games.
And this isn’t just about is large user base, it is among the select few of the viral applications that have managed to turn its popularity into finances. Valued at around $100 million and having corporate sponsors like Walmart and Nike, it’s well on its way to profitability. Given such success, it’s natural that entrepreneurs would like to replicate the same model in other markets to get a piece of success.
Latency
One of the most differentiating factors between apps like HQ Trivia and virtually any other app is how they broadcast content. While most of the apps have an individual outlook- offering each of the users with their own version of seamless experience, HQ Trivia has to ensure a seamless communal experience. That is, the content delivery not only has to be smooth for each user but must also remain uniform for every one of them. And that’s an insanely tough feat to achieve.
With millions of concurrent users, only 10 seconds for each question, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, and massive outrage from users at even millisecond-glitches, the stakes are high and requires the highest sophistication in app development.
Scale
HQ Trivia at its peak hosted around 2.2 million concurrent users. If you add to it the challenge of latency as mentioned above, the scale of the challenge is truly perplexing. That is, all the 2.2 million users have to be synced in real-time, the server has to serve the question, collect responses, and compute results- all in perfect sync.
Traffic fluctuations
The problem isn’t just the large scale- any decent load balancer can manage such scale if it’s stable. The problem is the sudden bursts of users. The application may spike from a few thousand to a few million active users in a matter of seconds- which simply isn’t enough to boot additional servers. And if not handled immediately, can bring the entire system crashing down. For avert such conditions, applications often keep additional computing power on backup and running to avoid having them to be booted up in the first place.
These are some of the structural matters of any trivia app like HQ that users don’t even notice. Of the things they do, the most crucial ones include:
Large payout
HQ Trivia till date has given away around half a million dollars in prize money and a single user has taken home the grand prize of 50K dollars. These are the kind of large numbers that attract users.
Excellent visuals and audio
Make sure have a nice studio for recordings and though managing appearances in a live session may seem challenging at first, rest assured it would get easier over time.
Engaging hosts
People these days have very short attention span so make sure not to bore them. Get a host who is fun, engaging and preferably recognized by a large number of users.
Closing remarks
From our discussion above, three things are absolutely clear:
- Apps like HQ Trivia is a recipe for success
- Managing and marketing such apps is fairly simple
- Building such apps is incredibly tough
So if you hire expert app development companies to take care of the latter, you just as easily have a successful application in your hand.
