Dolphin Browser Case Study

Dolphin Browser is a free mobile web browser developed by MoboTap, Inc. for Apple and Android Smartphones and tablets. The browser offers several unique features designed specifically for mobile environments including Dolphin Gesture, Dolphin Webzine and Dolphin Connect. Dolphin Gesture allows users to customize touch-based navigation such as drawing a heart to visit a dating website or a question mark to access a search engine. Dolphin Webzine displays individualized content in a magazine-style format, while Dolphin Connect syncs bookmarks between multiple Apple devices. In addition, the browser provides multi-touch zoom, tabbed browsing, push notifications, speed dial and over 50 add-ons for users to choose from.

When MoboTap began developing Dolphin in 2010, the company compared various cloud platforms, but could not find any that outperformed Amazon Web Services (AWS) features or customer support.

Yongzhi Yang, CEO of MoboTap explains, “AWS really helped us jumpstart Dolphin Browser. We were able to quickly build up and roll out multiple products and features that our customers like. In fact, we received over 200 emails per day with tons of product suggestions. Without AWS, there would have been no way for us to scale up this quickly to meet our growing customer needs.”

MoboTap’s comprehensive infrastructure now includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon CloudWatch. This wide spectrum of services supports nearly all of Dolphin’s primary tasks and peripheral requirements, including the corporate website, backend operations, push notifications, Dolphin Gesture, Dolphin Webzine, and Dolphin Connect.

Currently, MoboTap is running over eighty different AWS instances—a number that increases every month with user demand. The built-in continuity between AWS products and services provides MoboTap with a unified system that requires very few administrative resources. “AWS enables us to really focus on our business plan, feature design, and code completion. It saves us plenty of time on hardware reservation, machine maintenance, dynamic scale out, and disaster recovery,” notes Tiefeng Liu, CTO of MoboTap.

MoboTap believes that one of the keys to their success as a start-up is that they designed their own applications to be scalable from the beginning and then, “let AWS handle the execution.” Tiefeng Liu goes on to say, “AWS is superb for developers to quickly experiment, verify ideas, and prove technical feasibility in an economic and efficient way.”