Media on Swiggy’s Mobile Apps

Swiggy believes that a seamless and enjoyable user experience is essential to boost engagement. Images and videos are an integral part of that experience. Promotions, marketing campaigns, featured products and discounts in Swiggy are highlighted with eye-catching visuals that encourage users to explore them. Users open Swiggy with various intentions. Users ordering in look for the variety of food the restaurants offer. Users shopping for groceries may look for a collection of fruits and vegetables available. Users dining out look for the dining menu and the ambience. Pictures and videos help them discover what they want. So it is essential to showcase them in high quality. An experiment at Swiggy revealed that using high-quality media with animations improves clickthrough rates by a very good margin. However, ensuring the users are experiencing high quality while optimising for performance and cost is a big engineering challenge. Users access the app from a variety of devices and network conditions, and slow page loads, unresponsive apps and delays in data retrieval frustrate users. This article uncovers the techniques and methodologies Swiggy uses in the mobile apps to deliver high-quality media optimised for user experience, performance, network and cost.Choosing the right codec and format for media is crucial. The compression technique used significantly reduces the file size of the media. Swiggy is a media-heavy application. File sizes have a direct impact on the load time and consequently on the user experience.H.264 (Advanced Video Coding — AVC) is a common codec used with the MP4 format. This is supported by a wide range of mobile devices and has extensive hardware decoding support. VP9 is an open-source video codec developed by the WebM project delivering good quality at lower bitrates and smaller file sizes. Swiggy uses VP9-encoded videos to leverage the good quality they provide at relatively lower bitrates. This translates into faster video load times as the download size is small, delivering a seamless user experience.

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