It’s been an exciting period for Stream with the launch of Chat and the activity feed components for iOS/Swift. Here’s what’s next on the roadmap:
- AI-powered moderation for chat and activity feeds
- Android native for activity feeds
- Android & iOS native for chat
- Push for activity feeds
- Follow/Following counts on activity feeds
- Reaction counts for ranking on feeds
- Merge support for feeds
- CLI for feeds
- 99.999% uptime SLA
AI Moderation
AI has improved rapidly over the last few years. Nowadays it can detect things such as toxic content, obscene content, threats, spam, insults, and sexually explicit content quite accurately. Stream will offer an integrated AI based moderation solution. This enables you to detect problematic content in your chats or activity feeds with the flip of a switch.
Spam or offensive content can be very detrimental to long term user engagement. However, it’s usually not feasible to moderate the content in your apps in real time by relying only on human moderators.
Android, iOS & Integrated Push Capabilities
The team is currently working on Android support for activity feeds and iOS & Android support for Chat. In general, we’re making sure that you can add Stream on all major platforms without having to build the front-end/client-side from scratch.
Chat already supports push notifications and in the coming months, we’ll also add push support for activity feeds.
CLI
With Chat, we added support for a CLI to configure everything that’s available in the dashboard. In the coming months, we want to add the same capabilities for activity feeds. The goal here is to make sure that everything on Stream is configurable via code.
99.999% Premium Uptime SLA
There is a big difference between building an API that mostly works, and one that stays up and running during traffic spikes and instance failures. Stream has always been committed to providing a highly reliable service that large apps can count on. To reflect that commitment we’re now offering a premium 99.999% uptime SLA on enterprise plans. The SLA has a 1,000 acceleration ratio, so for every 1 minute of downtime, you get a refund for 1,000 minutes. (With a monthly cap of 50% of the plan price for the applicable month).
Other
There are a few commonly requested minor features that we are going to work on:
- Follow/Following counts on activity feeds
- Reaction counts for ranking
- Merge support for activity feeds (this is helpful in the case that you have duplicate feeds such as the same RSS feed or the same artists with slightly different names)
Stream’s Vision and the Path to Reusability
Our team is passionate about tackling difficult tech problems and creating reusable components for them. It’s been really awesome to see our customers succeed in industries as diverse as social, fintech, education, real estate, banking, and health care. More than half a billion end users rely on Stream’s technology.
For Chat as well as any new products we’ll launch we aim to follow this strategy to ensure real reusability:
1. Flexible
High-quality reusable components are part of the future of cloud computing. Teams that adopt them will have a massive advantage and ship a higher quality product experience, faster and at a lower cost. It only works if the API is flexible enough to accommodate the current product requirements as well as any possible requirements you’ll want to support in the future.
2. Frontend Components
Product teams often have a ton on their roadmap. Solving reusability for the backend alone is not enough. This is why Stream offers frontend components for React, React Native, Angular, iOS and Android (coming soon).
3. Easy & Reliable
For reusability to make sense you need the APIs to be super simple to use and well documented. You also need to be able to rely on excellent performance, scalability, and uptime. In addition to the tech side of things you also want to feel confident in the stability of the business providing the API.
Chat and Activity Feeds, What’s Next?
The benefits of not building everything in-house are enormous, we’ll typically see teams ship with:
- A more polished user experience
- Better focus on what makes their app unique
- Improved security
- Scalability, even for small teams
- Amazing performance
One of the reasons we launched Chat was the frequent requests about it from our customers. If you haven't tried it yet, you’ll enjoy the React Chat Tutorial and the Chat API tutorial.
Feel free to reach out if there are more problems we can help with. It will be a while until we launch our third product (at the moment we have our hands full with feeds and chat). I always enjoy learning about your products and tech architecture.
PS. We’re hiring! https://getstream.io/team/