App Context: User and Channel Metadata Storage

App Context provides easy-to-use, serverless storage for user metadata, channel metadata, device metadata, and channel memberships. Developers can store data that is common to their applications without having to spin up additional backend infrastructure and services. Users can manage data and build innovative, reliable, and scalable applications on PubNub using App Context.

Solving the Real-time Data Store Problem

Building real-time applications or a digital twin shouldn’t require you to spin up backend infrastructure to support what users consider native or part of the app. Not only does this take a developer’s time away from building the features, but it also puts the extra costs of maintaining new services on the builder.

Scaling these services can be another challenge, especially if you have millions of users or devices to manage. This presents a serious challenge of keeping your application real-time for your customers how they expect.

App Context takes this pain away from developers so they can focus on providing the best end-user experience on their apps or devices instead of worrying about infrastructure. With App Context, developers can simply use our pre-built services to set metadata for users, devices and channels, add and remove channel memberships for a user, or add members to a channel, all without deploying additional servers or setting up database tables.

Key Features

Scalable Storage for User, Device, and Channel Metadata

Store properties like a user’s name or email address and device ID as metadata on the user or device record. Similarly, store channel properties like channel name and description. This metadata can be set, removed, and fetched from the database.

Managing Channel Memberships

Create and store associations between users, devices, and channels. A user or device can belong to multiple channels, and a channel can have multiple members. Use Memberships to access these associations from the App Context database.

Real-time Data Events

Receive events in real-time when user/channel/device metadata is set, or channel memberships are modified in the App Context database. Client applications can receive these events to update a user’s profile or show an alert when a user is added to a channel.

How to Start Using App Context

New to PubNub? Great! You have nothing to worry about. You can start using App Context methods in the SDK by enabling the App Context feature from your Admin Dashboard. Once you sign up for a free account, just turn it on and select the region that should host your data. That's it, and now you’re ready to use the App Context to store metadata for your device or application.