Live Video Streaming Social Media App (Gapped)
Gapped Online redefines the motorsports experience with its cutting-edge app, offering dual-camera live streaming, personalised vehicle profiles, and competitive leaderboards—all while fostering a vibrant community of racing enthusiasts worldwide.
Inside the Gapped Online app
Gapped transforms how driving enthusiasts connect and share their passion. The app lets users live stream their drives, compare stats in private groups, and explore a vibrant community of content from around the world.
With dual-camera streaming and seamless social sharing, Gapped makes every drive an opportunity to connect.
Beyond driving, Gapped offers a hub of user-generated content, from racing to workshops, keeping users immersed in the thrill of motorsport. Subscribers enjoy exclusive perks, including entry into car giveaways, making Gapped the ultimate platform for car lovers everywhere.
Watch the Gapped Online promo video
Inside the Gapped app
A personalised vehicle profile, and the dual-camera recording engine that makes every drive shareable.
Rich user profile information
The Gapped app offers a comprehensive vehicle repository that allows users to personalise their profiles with the cars they own and drive. Users can track their best lap times, share posts, and access a full summary of their followers, those they follow, and the number of sessions.
This dynamic profile fosters a sense of identity on the app, encouraging users to engage and optimise for these key metrics. By giving users a sense of ownership over their incomplete profile, they are encouraged to build upon it and develop their persona in a way that appeals to their audience.
Dual camera recording solved
The Gapped project achieved a major innovation with its dual-camera technology. Many libraries support single-camera usage on the market, but robust cross-platform multi-camera support was previously unavailable.
Scorchsoft met this challenge by developing a robust mechanism to record both the front and rear cameras simultaneously — two live feeds — and stitch them into a unified feed. This feed included a map and lap timers and enabled seamless live streaming to other Gapped devices. This was a key component of the application's value proposition.
The project involved solving unique challenges related to synchronisation, video feed combination, and editing, while also considering the performance constraints of the user's device and aiming to minimise on-server processing costs, which could otherwise become expensive with a high user count. The dual-camera capability has since become a valuable foundation for Gapped, drawing user interest and driving the app's initial publicity.
Native programming (Swift) for dual recording
- Custom native programming (Swift): created a bespoke solution from scratch due to the scarcity of documentation on customising native camera packages in Swift.
- Advanced concurrency techniques: managed concurrent access to hardware resources, ensuring both camera feeds operated simultaneously without conflict.
- Optimisation for quality: leveraged GPU acceleration and hardware-specific optimisations to maintain high resolution, minimal lag, and superior audio quality.
Delivering a technically complex build
Planning, lap tracking, live streaming and a load-tested launch.
A technically complex project supported by excellent project planning
One of the key reasons Gapped Online chose Scorchsoft was not only our technical expertise but also our exceptionally thorough planning process, which set us apart from competitors. Our process gave the Gapped Online team a clear vision and confidence in the project's direction:
- Detailed wireframes: rapid prototyping and wireframes that illustrated the user journey and how technical components and features would blend together.
- Specification process: our exhaustive specification process left no stone unturned, offering Gapped Online a clear roadmap and eliminating uncertainties early in the project.
- Beta testing: before the full launch, the app was released to early pilot users and beta testers to gather valuable feedback, influencing future app requirements based on user demand.
Combining innovations to drive value
The Gapped Online project was a fascinating challenge that showcased our team's technical prowess. One standout feature was the ability to record track sessions, capturing lap metrics like speed, lap times, and each car's position on the track in real time.
- Real-time lap recording: as drivers cross the start/stop points, the app accurately records their lap times, which are then processed to qualify for track leaderboards.
- Competition features: the thrill of competition is alive as times are uploaded, allowing the Gapped community to vie for the top spot. Best lap videos are included so users can replay them and glean top racing tips from the pros.
- Community engagement: through these innovative solutions, we transformed the Gapped Online app into a dynamic platform that not only tracks performance but also fosters a vibrant, competitive racing community.
- Push notifications: users can receive notifications about the latest tasks, added points and posts from the social feed. Tapping a notification leads the user directly to the post within the app.
Live streaming technical complexities solved
The mission was clear: enable users to broadcast live videos to their audience in real time using the api.video live streaming API. Scorchsoft faced this challenge head-on to ensure seamless, high-quality streaming within the app.
- API integration: we designed the integration to handle all necessary API calls efficiently, from authentication and stream creation to broadcasting and ending live streams.
- Adaptive bitrate streaming: implemented to dynamically adjust video quality based on network conditions, ensuring a smooth viewing experience with minimal buffering.
- Scalable architecture: developed a scalable system capable of handling numerous concurrent live streams, maintaining reliability even during peak usage times.
The integration of live streaming capabilities within the Gapped Online application was a resounding success. This allowed users to broadcast their live streams seamlessly, with their content instantly available to the wider community.
Load tested go-live process
Understanding that Gapped Online was poised to onboard a large number of users during the initial launch due to a promotional campaign, Scorchsoft took proactive measures to ensure a smooth go-live process. Anticipating a high influx of users, we recognised the importance of preparing the app's infrastructure to handle significant traffic right from the start.
- Load testing: conducted extensive load testing to verify that the server configuration was robust enough to handle the expected volume of users without compromising response times or stability.
- Optimised performance: our testing ensured that the app could maintain optimal performance even under heavy load, providing users with a seamless and reliable onboarding experience.
This solid start was instrumental in building momentum and establishing Gapped Online as a trusted platform in the motorsports community.
The outcome
Scorchsoft's collaborative efforts with the Gapped Online Team resulted in the successful development of an advanced mobile app. The Gapped Online app stands as a testament to its initiative to connect racing enthusiasts in a more modern, convenient way via an enhanced user experience.
If you have a live streaming, social or motorsport app in mind, read more case studies, contact Scorchsoft, or book a free strategy call to talk it through.
What Our Clients Say
Scorchsoft helped us take our idea for an app and make it a reality. Everything from the planning meeting to decide what we really needed to the project management and execution was great. It was delivered on time - early in fact - and on budget. Highly recommend.
Rebecca PalserDragonfly IntelligenceScorchsoft is a brilliant company with fantastic knowledge of the mobile app industry. From the project management to the development team, they have been the perfect candidate for our project, and we can't thank them enough!
Lance ChorltonGapped OnlineWe're really pleased with the work Scorchsoft has done in developing our web portal! They have been accurate with timelines and budget, delivering a solid product that allows us to monitor and manage patients remotely while they use our novel medical device at-home. The "plan - design - build" approach has worked well and saved us time in the long-run by catching requirements and issues early.
Daniel GreenSensTrainI'm really pleased with how my app came out, it was exactly what I was looking for. The team at Scorchsoft are great at what they do and made the whole process as simple and easy as possible. Being someone who is not very tech savvy the set up and back end operations were done in a great easy to use manner even for myself which makes using my app stress free. Thanks to all the team!
Ruben CarrollMosaic MasterpiecesThe new Flourish Education website has already removed a lot of manual processes, freeing up both schools, candidates and internal employees time. We are delighted with the look and feel which is clean, professional and more engaging. We are also pleased with the decision to have an HD video background on the homepage, and building immediate trust with our clients by giving them a taste of what it looks like in the Flourish Education offices.
James HancocksMarketing Manager, Flourish Education I can't believe how quickly we started to see results with this project. Scorchsoft provided us with graphic-designed mockups of how the app would look once built, and we were able to sell the product for use by our first customer before the product was finished. Since launching in March, we have secured a major television network as a client who now uses Image Approvals to manage the talent approval process for their productions.
Aimee SpinksMD, ImageApprovals.com
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