Case Study: World Walking keeps 50,500+ users active and connected with Pusher Channels

Exploring the world from home with the World Walking app

World Walking is a virtual walking app founded to help people stay active and connected; during the COVID-19 pandemic the charity faced a surge in demand and needed better real-time social features and notifications to keep isolated users motivated. To solve that, the team integrated Pusher Channels (via the pusher/pusher-php-server package and Laravel Echo) to replace polling with a socket-based approach for live chat and instant updates.

Using Pusher, World Walking launched real-time group chat and push notifications tied to users’ routes and milestones, increasing engagement as the app grew to over 50,500 active members in early March 2020 and offering more than 44,500 routes. The platform’s community features supported heavy activity — users have logged over 27.3 billion steps to date — and enabled new partnerships, events and planned fundraising tools, demonstrating tangible reach and sustained user involvement powered by Pusher.

World Walking

Duncan Galbraith

Founder