Mobile and Edge Solutions with MongoDB and Ditto

Mobile and edge solutions offer impressive opportunities for profit and growth for a variety of businesses around the world. Companies have consistently found ways to use mobile applications to grow revenue, cut costs, and stay ahead of the competition.

In the power and utilities sector, for example, field workers can get enabled quickly by accessing their daily tasks on mobile devices and, in retail, consumers can use mobile apps to skip lines, providing businesses with upselling opportunities that can result in larger transactions. Indeed, mobile commerce is estimated to make up 44.6% of total US retail ecommerce sales in 2024. For banks, increased use of mobile applications can reduce operating costs by decreasing the demand for in-person and phone-based customer service. At the same time, having a mobile app allows financial institutions to reach additional customers, as many internet users around the world (particularly in developing countries) rely on mobile access.

Time and time again, we’ve seen that the most successful apps are those thats meet modern user expectations. Specifically, apps need to be fast and reactive, without lags or crashes. And if internet connectivity drops, the app should continue functioning normally until connectivity is restored. In cases where the workforce is located in low-connectivity areas—e.g., warehouses, factories, and rural areas—peer-to-peer sync is a requirement for apps to communicate with each other and sync data.

In such an ever-important space, partnerships are critical to combining the strengths of organizations to create solutions that would be challenging to develop independently.

At MongoDB, we’re laser-focused on bringing the best solutions to customers. So we’re thrilled to announce MongoDB’s partnership with Ditto, a company that enables consistently fast data synchronization between devices like mobile phones and point-of-sale systems for mission-critical enterprise apps regardless of environment connectivity and existing infrastructure. With MongoDB and Ditto, businesses can drive consistent revenue at the edge without Wi-Fi, servers, or a cloud connection. Retailers can sell products, banks can deliver services, and energy companies can conduct operations anywhere without worrying about connectivity.

Welcome to our mobile partner, Ditto

Based in San Francisco, Ditto is revolutionizing the mobile app development space. Ditto technology uses existing devices like phones and tablets to create a distributed wireless network that can sync data anytime, even without the internet, Wi-Fi, or servers.

With Ditto’s SDK, devices automatically discover, connect, and sync with each other in peer-to-peer (P2P) mesh networks. This means that when the internet goes down or Wi-Fi is spotty, deskless workers can continue to serve customers or complete business-critical workflows.

Ditto manages a mesh network of devices and automatically syncs data changes locally in the mesh and opportunistically with the cloud when available. Depending on the environment and device positioning, Ditto intelligently switches between LAN, BLE, P2P Wi-Fi, IP-based transports, and cellular to ensure that apps get the fastest sync.

Ditto’s platform has two major components:

• Small Peer/Ditto SDK: This is the Ditto SDK embedded into an application that lives on a mobile device, point of sale system, IoT device, and more. There can be many Small Peers in a solution. Small Peers self-organize and sync with each other regardless of internet connectivity and with the cloud when connectivity is available.

• Big Peer: Ditto’s middleware platform that receives the data from small peers and forwards them to MongoDB.

And some of the unique value propositions that Ditto offers include:

• Self-organizing mesh networking: Devices running Ditto-powered apps automatically and securely discover nearby peers and form wireless, distributed networks.

• Intelligent peer-to-peer data sync: Devices in the mesh exchange data in real-time via Bluetooth Low Energy, Peer-to-Peer Wi-Fi, Local Area Network, and more.

• Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs): Ditto peers each have a local database. To ensure low-bandwidth usage and concurrent edits, only the deltas, or changes, are synced

• Distributed architecture: As the image below shows, Ditto isn’t reliant on a centralized system to synchronize data. Each device has an embedded database capable of reading, writing, and syncing deltas within the mesh. This means there is no single point of failure, such as a cloud or server.

With MongoDB and Ditto working together, developers can create robust data pipelines from mobile to cloud. MongoDB Atlas is a multi-cloud developer data platform that gives users the versatility they need to build a wide variety of applications—including mobile applications. With MongoDB Atlas, users can scale their mobile applications’ backend confidently with a foundation built for resilience, performance, and security. Additionally, MongoDB Atlas enables delivering fast and consistent mobile user experiences in any region on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—or replicate data across multiple regions and clouds to reach wider audiences and protect against broader outages.