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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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