When you lose internet, you get a ! next to the bars (at least I have on my last few androids). Usually I also have no bars when I lose internet, but sometimes I've got coverage without data flow.

Wish Apple would do that. It’s kind of a guessing game.

You can have full bars and no internet when jammed in a crowded space with full pipes. Just because the PHY is linked doesn't mean you have internet.

True, but brownout due to network congestion is not the complaint here.

You should but you don't always

Almost like it should just be a combo of realized ping + internet speed instead of signal strength

Yes, please!

And while we're at it: Just surface the fact that connectivity sucks to applications (maybe even at the socket layer, by just closing them if there's not been any forward progress for a certain time), rather than showing me loading screens that'll never go anywhere for minutes.

This would give apps that do have some offline caching the chance of falling back to that (looking at a certain green music streaming service here).

It is surfaced to apps, but the "just detecting that connectivity sucks" heuristic turns out to be not all that easy to implement. There doesn't seem to be a better heuristic than "try and let the app decide if waited too long".

There are some comments here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/systemconfiguratio...