Case Study: Buffer (social media management platform) achieves proactive, real-time Android updates and fresher content with Pusher (a MessageBird company)'s Reactive-Pusher

Making Buffer for Android more proactive with Reactive-Pusher

Buffer, a social media management platform and long-time Pusher customer, needed its Android app to reflect server-side changes immediately so users wouldn’t have to rely on manual pull-to-refresh. Events such as new or edited updates, draft approvals, analytics collection, and profile pause/unpause needed to trigger instant UI refreshes; Buffer used Pusher’s real-time service and the pusher-websocket-java client to solve this connectivity challenge.

Pusher supplied the real-time connectivity and Java client library, and Buffer implemented a Reactive-Pusher wrapper to integrate Pusher into their RxJava-driven architecture. The solution automatically refreshes four key event streams (queue updates, drafts, analytics, and profile pause state), giving users consistently fresh content while simplifying developer work—subscriptions are handled within the same reactive streams, reducing errors and easing maintenance.

Buffer

Joe Birch

Senior Android Engineer