The White Noise Market is getting a MAJOR overhaul that requires all users to upgrade to the latest versions of the iOS App and Android App. White Noise Market Apps that are not upgraded to at least 9.0 will no longer work in the coming weeks. This is because we are changing our cloud provider and unfortunately prior versions were hard-coded and can not be automatically switched to the new platforms. The latest version works with our existing platform and will continue to work once we switch to the new provider. Upgrading your client apps now will help avoid service interruption in the coming weeks. Check the latest status updates at the bottom of this article.
Why the major update?
The original market platform was launched almost 10 years ago (November, 2014) and we standardized on Google App Engine. We were able to quickly produce scalable code that allowed our entire user base to upload and share sounds. However, as time went on, it has become increasingly difficult to add new features. New technologies have been invented since our initial release which have become the industry standard for creating portable and scalable code–Docker and Kubernetes. It was time to make the switch and we have spent the last year rewriting all our existing code to remove AppEngine specifics and run it inside of a portable Docker container. Docker is an impressive technology that allows you to run your code inside a container on any operating system in the cloud or on your local workstation during development. Running our docker containers on a Kubernetes cluster gives us the scalability and uptime that we enjoyed with AppEngine. As cloud providers continue to increase their costs, it’s important for us to have the flexibility to run our code anywhere.
The absolute biggest change made to our codebase was replacing our backend database from Google Datastore to an open source relational database. Datastore was great at first but as time went on it has been difficult to add new features. In the future, the switch to a relational database will make it easier to provide a personalized experience for users, show reports on various trends, provide sound recommendations, and much more! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we needed to port the existing features to the new platform and make sure everything is stable.
The Transition
The transition to the new platform will take a couple days and during this time we will have to disable new user accounts and sound uploads. Sound listening stats will not be updated leading up to and during the transition but they are being recorded and will be applied after the transition. There will be issues along the way so be sure to check back to this blog for the latest status updates. In the meantime, please upgrade your iOS and Android White Noise Market apps so you are ready to join us in this adventure.
Latest Status Updates
- 5/6/2024 – White Noise Market 9.0 for iOS released to the Apple App Store.
- 5/7/2024 – White Noise Market 9.0 for Android released to the Google Play Store.