Our Product Roadmap: Taking Channels and Beams to even greater success

Channels is used by 3,500 paying customers worldwide to build a huge variety of connected experiences, and we never stop being amazed and delighted by what they build. With that in mind, we’re currently re-focusing our strategy around Channels and its complement Beams. We’re looking forward to bringing out a bunch of improvements this year.

In recent years, we’ve not been adding a huge amount of features to our primary product. This is partly because we wanted to keep it simple, but mainly because we were building other products for our portfolio. We’ve always been interested in solving more problems for developers building engaging applications. Now it’s time for us to bring more attention to Channels and Beams, and provide more value to our customers.

At this difficult time in the world, we’re excited that we’re helping developers to create vital communication and collaboration experiences. These are fundamental for bringing humans closer together, even when we are forced to separate.

Immediate plans for Channels and Beams

E2E Encryption is coming out of beta
Our immediate product plans are to take our end to end encryption tool out of beta for Channels with some new libraries. We’ve listened to our customers tell us that they’d like even more control of their data, and we’re really pleased with the improvements we’ll be announcing to help them take that control.

State management
Next up on our roadmap are solutions we’ve been working on to make state management more powerful with our product. We want to introduce new entities to our libraries that allow developers to work with changing values, rather than raw messages. We think this opens up possibilities for lots of different applications.
We’re also looking at greater resiliency in recovering state after network interruptions. We know there are lots of ways that we can improve this to ensure peace of mind for all developers replicating realtime state.

The best framework support
Throughout these improvements we’ll also be widening support for some of the latest and greatest technology frameworks. Though our libraries work extremely well in all major development environments, we want to make sure we have idiomatic solutions that make the most of each platform’s strengths.

Making Beams stronger
For Beams, we’re looking to have stronger integration with Channels, and more resources dedicated to getting people started. With its powerful features, Beams is perfect for all developers who need critical transactional information delivered every time across all the major platforms.

Supporting chat experiences

You may have seen that we are shutting down Chatkit soon. I can understand that this may cause some concern. I can reassure you that this decision wasn’t taken lightly. Fundamentally, our business is extremely sustainable. Chatkit was a new product that we were trying to get off the ground, but ultimately met with resistance in terms of competitors and external environment.

Customers have used Channels to build chat solutions for some time, even before we started making it a specialised product. You can rest assured that if you were building Chat solutions with Channels, these are in no way affected by the Chatkit shutdown.

Give us your feedback

Ultimately, we just want to make our products better for you so you can build great things. We’re interested in your feedback about how we can be providing more value to you and your teams. Please let us know the kinds of problems you’re facing that you’d like us to be solving; technical deficiencies of our products; and even the specific solutions you wish existed.

We’ll be sending out some surveys soon. In the meantime, if you want to send me any thoughts, please do so directly.