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Re:The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night by xnyan on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @06:48PM (#22242440)
Counterpoint, the primary use environment of the application will be on a smartphone. Web applications are not even second class citizens on iOS. In a situation where the user will be entering data all night, opening and closing and refreshing, variable internet connection quality and so on, all else being equal I would imagine the ideal platform would be a native application.

I lean towards agreeing with you that a simple website plus cheap laptop would the real world best case, but I can understand why you would want a native app.

Re:The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night by boardwaalk on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @07:27PM (#22242739)
You could use local storage and make an offline web app to avoid data loss.

I agree a web app isn't great for low friction data entry, but they only enter the totals for each candidate x each round, so that'd be a dozen or two dozen short numbers for the whole night per user.

I found this which has some specifics: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/politics/iowa-caucus-voting-a...

The only extra thing I see is a photo upload. Which is not rocket science from a web app either. At least on iOS you can take people right to the photo gallery or the camera.

I would really like to believe this isn't a flask app I couldn't whip up in an afternoon and polish over a week in my free time... but I'm having a hard time.

Re:The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night by ss2003 on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @07:09PM (#22242603)
Maybe but I would guess that none of those factors were even considered.