Supabase Realtime cuts mobile polling costs with WebSocket-based presence and data sync
Supabase Realtime offers a WebSocket-based alternative to the common mobile practice of polling APIs at fixed intervals, which wastes battery, data, and server resources. A chat app with 10,000 daily users polling every five seconds can generate over 170 million requests per day, compared to roughly 10,000 persistent connections with WebSockets. The platform provides three core primitives — broadcast for ephemeral messages, presence for tracking online users, and Postgres Changes for streaming row-level database events — designed to cover most production mobile use cases. Unlike silent poll-timer failures during iOS backgrounding or Android Doze mode, WebSocket disconnections are explicit and observable, making resyncing straightforward. Supabase Realtime also respects existing row-level security policies, meaning developers do not need to build a separate authorization layer for real-time subscriptions.
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