We already have a ton of apps which assume that everyone has a decent internet connection at all times.

I frequently land in places where my connection is but a trickle(with an absurd ping of 20s at that), and because of that a large part of apps simply refuse to work.

One notable exception is Facebook Messenger - if it doesn't work then you really don't have internet.

And this is infuriating. I would expect mobile apps to be able to deal better with complete/spotty loss of Internet connection than PC programs, not worse !

I roadtrip and camp alot. It's amusing how many campground/boondocking locator apps require cell service. They often have a ton of other features, but downloading a dataset is not one of them. They want people to add, rate, and comment on campsites and yet, again, have no offline abilities. Doh!

Facebook Messenger was (is still?) based on the MQTT protocol https://mqtt.org/2011/08/mqtt-used-by-facebook-messenger that is specifically designed to be forgiving of low bandwidth or intermittent connectivity. It's a great example of a company picking the right tool for the job instead of falling victim to not-invented-here syndrome.

I love Twitter this way, which is built "offline first". Twitter will let you read everything in your timeline that you have previously downloaded, let you reply to and like as many tweets as you want, and never complain about lack of connectivity. It'll just dutifully queue your requests and act on them once you're back online. It's one of the only connected apps properly usable on the subway.

WhatsApp is another one of those, it was designed from the ground up for 2G and terrible signal. Whenever I had absurd ping or a 1-2KB/s connection, WhatsApp would still pull through and function as if my network was perfect (except for media download/upload of course).

I found that the slack desktop application works WORSE than the browser app in limited connection scenarios.

The browser will attempt to slowly load while the application outright refuses to attempt, and claims it has no connection, even the the browser is loading

My experience is the Slack website works better than the app in all circumstances.

30 years ago Lotus Notes offered an application development platform designed to work well with slow or intermittent network connections. It's a shame how far the industry has regressed since then.

Or in my case, a bank that assumes I have mobile phone coverage at home. When I try to order anything on the internet these days it wants to send me a 6 digit SMS code, so now I can't order anything on the internet (although Amazon and Paypal still work, touch wood).

Get a Google Voice account and use that number for SMS. Works great over wifi.

I'm trying to reduce any dependence on Google. Nevertheless I just tried it out and it says it's not available in my country.

Skype numbers support this (in some countries), too. I live outside the US but have a US Skype number for this very purpose.

While I like the spirit of this thread of work-around suggestions, I can't help but think that using $RandomService to verify access to someone's bank account is a terrible idea.

It's bad enough having banks rely on a phone system where most carriers are perfectly happy to let anyone who knows your Address, DOB and Mother's Maiden name to port your phone number to a new SIM.

It probably requires less effort (and certainly less risk of discovery) to take over a Skype, Google Voice or other VOIP/SMS service.

It's a terrible idea, but until banks and other websites quit weaponizing 2FA in the name of security theater, workarounds like this are sometimes the only option.

In fact California has perhaps more blind spots than live. Ok, it is an overstatement, but we had several days of no cell service on our last roadtrip. We had only cell based navigation because the 'GPS' they suggested at the car rental was just a smartphone, so why not using ours instead. We had quite a bit of a challenge finding room in the night when firefighters took all rooms in a perhaps 100 mi radius in the period of wildfires, we had to rearrange plans in the dark without local knowledge on a remote hilly road leading who knows where and how long with tank getting empty and with no light or people in sight for almost 60 minutes except some shady figures started to follow us after passing them standing in a parking lot discussing something over their car.

Yeah, cell service is not something to rely upon in California!

That sounds like incredibly poor planning on your part and a series of bad decisions.

Vacationing in wildfire regions during wildfire season.

You let your fuel tank get low without knowing when or where your next fillup would be.

You didn't have hotel reservations in advance.

You waited until nightfall to find a room.

You're relying on a smartphone for navigation.

You didn't make offline maps of the whole region on everyone's devices. All of California is only around 2gb in Google Maps. That functionality has existied for a decade.

Along with all of the above, AAA still has free paper maps. If you're traveling anywhere outside the major cities, always bring a paper map with you. It doesn't need to be your primary method of navigation, but when your phone battery is dying, or your navigation app refuses to load because of spotty signal, the paper map will still work.

That's an excellent suggestion, especially if you're trying to disconnect and go electronics free. Sadly a lot of people can't even read a map anymore.

Until you mentioned, I didn't even consider that someone might actually have trouble with reading a paper map. I guess these days with location services on your phone, you never need to really find where you are in the first place. You just tap the button to zoom to your location, and go from there.

I don't like the navigation feature in most Apps because I like to know my next couple moves. Google Maps has a tendency to tell you "turn now" or "turn back there".

I have discovered by driving with others as navigators, that a lot of people cannot read a map and are literally just doing what the App says.

If you miss a turn, people are incapable of looking at the map and saying "go one more block and take a left to get back on course". They have to wait for a reroute.

You know, we had a road trip in California, not only in that problematic part of it where the fire developed while being on the road (2 days out of 13). Which forced us dropping previous plans, revising plans due to parts of our destinations became unreachable. And the alternates becoming occupied making us searching for new accommodation extended beyond nightfall and destinations anticipated. The rest is on us, yes, not buying our own offline navigation just for this trip intending to use the one from car rental assuming they provide one that is adequate for the area they operate in. Or not spending extended time on building up the offline map to the desired resolution for much more than we intended to go to. Well, we knew about the blind spots but planed for it except the consequences of the newly developed wildfire.

Probably next time you should only express opinion in topics you not only see from the idealistic viewpoint of an outsider.

Or simply not deviate from the topic of bad cell coverage just to criticize someone in something you cannot comprehend fully.

If I'd be the creator of Black Mirror this would be a fun idea to bounce around in the writers room.

Exactly what I was thinking! This had black mirror written all over it

Make it happen in Death Valley, for increased drama.

Slightly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(film)

Let’s hope they don’t do Ambulances and fireengines.

That would be absolutely frustrating. I have no idea how they can keep the confidence of their customers. It’s such an egregious non-starter.

ah come on, don't give anyone ideas :)

btw, testing is very important and i think most companies don't exhaust enough test cases. had google maps gone bonkers in the country especially during very bad weather. i don't think there is a map app out there that takes the weather into account...

How would weather affect a map ??

At a guess I suspect they mean more the route finding than the map part e.g. maybe don't send me on that nice shortcut across a mountain range if there is a blizzard up there. Part of me suspects google maps would figure this out by proxy in the same way it magically knows about traffic jams before you get to them but there are probably pathological cases where because no one is stupid enough to try it google don't have enough information to not recommend it.

Are there any nav/driving apps that show current weather overlaid on the map?

Seems like a useful thing but I don’t see it in Waze, gMaps, or aMaps. Why is that?

Weather maps are expensive - IBM has acquired the cheap providers in the space in the last few years. Free data providers don't provide less than zip-code-level resolution, much less something good enough for a live overlay.

Funny thing is that I don't need the 10-day forecast when driving across the state, I just need to know if there's rain/snow/winds ahead on my particular section of the highway.

Seems like that's available from NOAA for cheap, isn't it?

Google maps needs internet connectivity. Bad weather could affect internet connectivity.

It hopefully doesn't - at least for the mobile app ! I'm pretty sur it can download maps and work offline ?

Does everything has to be 100% reliable though? That has a cost and it may be not be worth it to pay that cost. A heart-lung machine does need to be 100% reliable though, which is as a matter of fact, is actually quite expensive, to be 100% reliable.

Sure, each reliability nine increases the cost 10x. However, this doesn't even look like 90%...

> However, this doesn't even look like 90%...

Are you saying that 90% of rental through phone are made in area without data service?

I'm a big user of Communauto in Quebec, which is a similar car sharing service but does have a key inside (I'm pretty sure they do have the same issue of unlocking the car though, but you take and release the car at the same spot, so the unlock will work at first for sure, and afterward you should keep the key). 99% of my usage with them has been done with data coverage. I only used it once without cell coverage and funnily enough I may have stressed them a bit because I was close to the border and it lasted 48 hours ;).

Fair point.

I guarantee on the first day, at the first meeting, someone said "well what happens if they drive a car out of cell range?" and they were immediately shut down.

They probably used too much YAGNI,TDD,MVP and similar fancy named cool techniques and less good old thinking.

I mean in principle TDD could actually prevent this kind of thing because it actually encourages you to think of failure scenarios.

There are many benefits to TDD but sometimes actual QA is replaced with basic/trivial unit tests.

How agile of them!

Right! They'll be iterating on the design and correct bugs during next sprint, while their users are stuck in the middle of nowhere. The system works!

That Agile Mindset becomes literal at the point one is reduced to the Mark-1 Foot for transportation.

We’re much closer to 100% cell coverage than you might think... https://lynk.world/ developed a way to connect to totally unmodified phones (using LTE) using LEO satellites. Some very clever scheme for dealing the assumed latency.

Satellites don't work well when you're 3 stories down in a parking garage

Very true.

Solar powered. After all, the sun has been shining for billions of years.

Looks like a case of great app developed without testing the usecase scenarios.