Hacker News Reader

Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly. It’s truly staggering how, even when I do everything I can to say: save this journey, don’t delete the map around it, don’t delete the journey, just passively show me where I am next to it, it will gleefully delete everything.

I once met their lead designer (who had just changed to work at another FAANG) and… boy was that not a conversation I wanted to have. You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy. Literally 45 minutes of monologue, none of it about connectivity, being lost or unfamiliar languages. Just how people were wrong, wrong reviews wrong and how they couldn’t read information properly unless they had ‘a mission’. “What if the mission is finding their way in a new city where they don’t have connection?” Didn’t care. Not a real mission.

A little later, he was told that the company he was now working for throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy. That was not a conversation he wanted to have.

View on HN

I had a bizarre encounter when working there, also Maps related. I lived in the UK at the time and my post code just didn't exist in Google Maps. I did some digging, and found out that in fact no post codes in the UK had been added in quite some time.

Eventually I found out why: There was some lead dev on Maps, who refused to allow new imports of UK post code data because he thought they were "wrong". They were seeing data with multiple post codes for the same building!

For the record: This is valid in the UK, as there's a maximum number of households per post code or something like that.

Not sure how that ended eventually, left a few years ago, but I just checked and those post codes now exist.

It is quite valid for one property to have multiple street addresses and therefore postcodes. It could genuinely have frontage in two streets, or it could be the result of joining two properties in the same street that originally had different postcodes – many long streets have multiple postcodes along their length¹.

---

[1] For example even a not-very-long street I used to live on, Alma Terrace in York, has three postcodes: YO10 4DJ on one side of most of it, YO10 4DL on the other side of that, and YO10 4DQ for both sides of the part between that and Fulford Road. I suspect from the street layout that the third code is due to that part of the road being added later, or originally not having anything on it needing a postcode.

In London what ends up happening is that many buildings are so large (e.g. St. George's Wharf[0]) that the household count restriction ends up with multiple codes being allocated.

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/St._Geor...

And it's also valid for UK postcodes to be reused, e.g. following demolition of the original buildings, e.g. tower blocks, the postcode may be deactivated for a period of time, then reactivated when new buildings elsewhere need a new postcode.

The UK system is that the pair ("number", postcode) must be unique for any postal address; "number" is often a house number but things like "1A" or even names like "Whitehall" are allowed too.

Further, as mentioned, there is a limited amount of "number" that can be associated with any one postcode (currently 100 for new codes, but some legacy postcodes may have more), so for a long enough street, the postcode will change at some point - for example Chepstow Road, Newport changes from NP182LU to NP182LX at some point. If you have more addresses in a single building than the 100 limit, then the postcode indeed changes within the building.

This is quite useful as the standard way of entering a shipping address is you type your postcode, and then select the exact address from a dropdown, and there's a natural limit on how long you have to scroll to find yours.

So a thing that increments "number" is probably also "flat", which probably leads to what I understood as "household" in a large building.

"Flat" increments "number" if and only if it has a separate post box. If you have several flats behind the same box in a common front door - a common set-up in the UK when a larger house has been converted into several flats - then as far as the postcode system is concerned, those flats don't exist; since people still write "Flat 3, 11 Wisteria Drive ..." on letters this creates various issues with denormalised addresses.

How much influence does a building owner/developer have over this assignment? Can they explicitly request multiple post codes for a building?

Not always, I've had that exact situation and the flat number was in all systems. All houses in my postcode had several entries for flats and as far as I can tell, they all only had one box.

Sounds like a great system! US "zip codes" are pretty useless by comparison.

As an example, with a postcode "N1C 4DN" we soon learn that means North London (the N), the innermost district (the 1) and the innermost bit of that (the C). Stick it in https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode and we have 5 addresses to choose from.

There are usually 10 to 30 — if you work in a large office it probably has a postcode just for that office, for houses you share with 20-30 or so others. (Very large businesses might have separate postcodes for individual departments, e.g. an electric utility probably has one for handling bills, and another for everything else.)

"What's the postcode please?"

"N1C 4DN"

"And the number?"

"12"

Now they have the whole address. Satnav can take "N1C 4DN" and be very close: https://goo.gl/maps/sGR5XXhmUsLmD2UBA (not the best polygon, should be Handyside Street.)

> with a postcode "N1C 4DN" we soon learn that means North London (the N), the innermost district (the 1)

N1 is innermost, yes, but N2 onwards are sorted alphabetically, and N1C isn't really more "inner" than N1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_postal_district

> we have 5 addresses to choose from

(8 if you scroll down)

I’ve had to deal with postcodes in too many countries (logistic company), and the UK system is by far the best: dense, standard, somewhat intuitive, code-correcting, specific enough (several dozen households) that if you have a delivery, the recipient knows where the van is standing angrily. Documentation is excellent (relative to the UK government's digital service already very high standards), and you have APIs for all sorts of relevant conversions.

The only issues are what OC mentioned: some people don’t know a large building (50+ flats) can have several codes, and they are weekly updates because… ::magic dust:: construction!

The worst? Dubai: three inconsistent systems of varying length without any sense, standard, or redeeming features. The city road network is apparently even worse, so I guess those things work hand in hand?

The funniest? One person once joked that people in Ireland were not using postcodes, just the name of the nearby pub, which can get confusing as they often have the same name, so you also have to say the name of the second nearest pub…

I thought was funny, but I wasn’t sure that was a joke. Apparently, that was still true at the time? I saw a lot of discussion about “Introducing PostCodes in Ireland” and avoided those meetings so as not to sound clueless. We used Google Maps for a while during the transition.

I mean it's funny, but I don't know if I'd call it true. It was more that if you didn't know an address you could bet that the pub would help direct. (Probably wouldn't work anymore because all the rural pubs are closing)

Theres a difference between a system and embodied knowledge. I did a lot of work with systems which used Irish addresses early in my career.

"An Post", pre-eircode operated off a traditional hierarchical address system. Where there were "Counties" a real political boundary, "Post towns" which were usually big market towns but the location of a major sorting office, "Localities" (sometimes more than one) which were geographically undefined (we tried) at worst areas and some combination of street and buildings. The hierarchy was not strictly defined, it was a bit hungover.

My own address can be a combination of: <House number> <Street>, <Post town> <House number> <Street>, <Locality>+, <Post town>

Most of these were optional. The "Pub" thing is a testament to how awesome the staff at An Post are at just getting a letter to a door. If you needed to send a letter to "Mary O'Shea" who you knew lived in Kerry and near "Paudie O'Sheas pub" you can bet that if you put "Mary O'Shea, Near Paudie O'Shea's Pub, Kerry" you can bet the letter would get to Kerry, someone in Kerry would know Paudie O'Sheas is in Ventry, Send it on to Dingle and he postie doing the rounds in Ventry would be like "Ah right, thats for Mary" and the only catch being: about 60% of the Female population of West Kerry are probably called some combination of "Mary" and "O'Shea".

I'd imagine logistics companies were dancing for joy with every house having a unique post-code.

The US ZIP+4 code (five digit zip code with four digit extension) does this. But nobody uses the ZIP+4 it seems.

That's a bit chicken and egg; I have my ZIP+4 in 1Password (mostly so I don't forget what it is) but that also means it autocompletes the full ZIP+4 into form fields. I'd wager it's easily 90% of the forms that flag the field as "invalid," forcing me to delete the dash and 4 numbers. And I'm not talking about the setups where there is a separate textbox for the +4, I mean the inputs are always "but a zipcode is 5 digits hurr"

So, with users being actively taught not to provide it, of course no (reasonable? :-D) person is going to know it and thus provide it to make it available for use

Any info on how could I have my street address corrected on Maps?

They are using a random street name that no one else uses and no matter how many times I report it, they don't change it. It also doesn't matter that I'm a local guide with many, many edits.

If you work there you can maybe reach someone, but at this point the company is so large that even that doesn't help anymore in many cases ;)

You can ask a few friends to report it as well. I suspect Google looks at how many reports are made for a feature.

This is also valid in Japan, there's huge build with a mall, a hotel and residences called sunshine city in Tokyo, every few floors has it's own zip code!

https://www.post.japanpost.jp/cgi-zip/zipcode.php?pref=13&ci...

Search for 170-0013 for the beginning of the madness. At least google accepted this one.

I think this is actually a really perfect demonstration of why you often shouldn't attribute things to malice which can be explained by incompetence.

This is on my mind a lot when I see speculation about why google (or other large organizations) does various things. It's just a bunch of human beings with egos and biases and blind spots and imperfect information. Mistakes are made.

I'll bet he can reverse a binary tree blindfolded though.

But that is malice. They're specifically fucking over an entire country because they believe that post codes shouldn't be that way. They know otherwise.

No, it isn't. It's ignorance. It's incompetent to be ignorant of something that matters to doing a good job. It's possible to remain ignorant about something despite being told the correct information. (This is the difference between "ignorant" and "unaware".)

Malice requires intent to do wrong, either for some selfish benefit or just to be cruel. That's not what's going on in this story, it's "just" ignorance.

Thank you for that insight. That explains a lot of the bizarre design decisions and shortcomings in the maps UI that have frequently annoyed me.

> I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly

Very simple answer - they want to know everything you do online. As Google Maps is provided for free, you are the product. Convenience of the product (you) is not a priority whatsoever.

> designers like to say that users are always right?

It's just smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately IT breeds a number of people who have ignorant position they have the right to tell people how they should interact, conveniently forgetting the service will be used by all groups of people, not just IT geeks.

This lowbrow criticism is really old. Google doesn’t do much offline for the same reason almost no one does offline anymore; it’s hard and the number of users affected is very small.

Do you honestly think Google is looking at the number of maps users that go offline and saying, “We absolutely need their data!” rather than “Eh, not worth rearchitecting everything for.”

Not to mention they have done a lot for it even if it’s not perfect. There’s a dedicated team doing their best with it. It’s just not worth giving a lot of attention and resources.

This post is about an offline maps app which is maintained by volunteers, so it can't be that hard for the likes of Google.

Google could certainly design a basic offline mapping app. They even have offline mapping in their app today.

I’m actually not even sure what the complaint is actually about since I don’t use offline myself, but I know that Google Maps is a massive app with tons of teams all working on a myriad of features in parallel and a huge dependency tree. So I’m not surprised at all if there are a bunch of features with online assumptions baked in.

As an egregious google maps power user, these are the ones that bother me:

1. Offline maps don't actually download all the destinations in the mapped area

2. Google maps is bad at displaying densely packed businesses - this is an issue online as well

3. No offline bike or transit directions

These are the 3 I checked immediately in organic maps, and all work significantly better there.

I think your point is reasonable, but I'm also a very high income person who thinks nothing of buying data plans when traveling internationally and has an unlimited plan in the US. I routinely meet people while traveling who have the opposite set of financial priorities, organic maps is probably a great choice for them.

Supporting offline would take design, effort, and testing.

Anything can be done. But you can't do everything.

Sure but Google could surely do this.

Offline maps in Google have been blocked also by map data license terms - their providers just dont want to allow this, as they want to sell it as premium thing.

It isn't very difficult to log the events to disk and send them later. In fact I would be shocked if they didn't do this already. Offline support wouldn't noticeably affect the data they receive. In fact it may help it if people are using the app more and the event delivery is more reliable.

One real reason could be ads. Unless they are pre-loading ads for offline display than offline browsing will not produce revenue.

Realtime data is much more valuable than delayed data.

This will be mega off-topic, but:

> throttled wifi every Wednesday to encourage empathy

As much as slow internet hampered my productivity, I used to have 15 mbit/s download speed until very recently (Germany is behind developing countries, of course, in terms of anything internet), it was good to experience.

Before that, when I was living in the countryside, I had 500 KB/s.

I know exactly how painful downloading 10, 100, 1000MB is, and I try to make everything I do load on GPRS with reasonable speed. My website, much like HN, loads on a 64 kbit/s mobile internet "connection".

Of course vodafone's website to recharge prepaid phones takes 20+ minutes (yes) to load on 64 kbit/s internet.

Am I just old if I as a developer think that 10mbit/s is plenty enough? I could probably do with 1mbit/s and still be about as productive as I am now.

Unless your coworkers find it it absolutely normal to design a system that needs pulling half of the Internet for every build, because they do have a gigabit connection.

Developers should use old hardware and slow connections, they would make much better apps.

As someone working in a company using old hardware and slow connections, hard disagree.

I would guess it's probably because the rest of the industry is happily wasting hardware and bandwidth because they can afford it.

If the whole industry had been stuck on hardware and bandwidth from 10 years ago, that most likely wouldn't be a problem.

You may not like it, but GP has a point: you are probably making better applications than you would if you had access to very fast hardware and massive bandwidth. Because that tends to invite bloat and you are now more or less forced to deal with it yourself rather than to foist it off on the users. So whatever hardware they have they may well find it runs faster than it does on your machine. Rather than the opposite.

You are not alone. The last time a home internet upgrade felt really significant to me was going from 2mbit to 8mbit. Everything else has been luxury. Though I'll be signing up for ~160 or ~1000 as soon as the new cables the street was recently dug up to put in place are connected, I like my luxuries!

I do still notice upstream improvements though. Both those old 2mbit and 8mbit connections were 256kbit up, and I currently have "up to 17mbit" which is [quick check of router logs] ~11mbit ATM - that can be limiting for backups or when wanting to share video or HQ photos with a large group. So the FTTP upgrade _might_ be justifiable as more than pure luxury.

DSL can usually do up to 250 mbit/s, no?

The standard FTTC options in the UK are nominally 40/10 and 80/20. I have the latter, which in reality works out as “up to 76mbit down, up to 17mbit up”. My router is currently synced at 56/11. Where G.FAST is available IIRC that is up to 250down/36up.

The engineers who invented DSL did Gbit/s speeds in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, real life 50 year old copper pairs aren't as fast as those in their lab...

Near Silicon Valley, we would get 256kbit theoretical.

you get used to high speed. I have recently had to download a 3Gb file on a 100mbit wifi. god, it took 5 minutes! that would take <1min on my 1gbit at home.

Low speed is ok, stability matters more imho.

There are old people in my village complaining that the 200 Mbps connection is "horrific" because there is something wrong with their equipment/setup so it cuts out often and leads to buffering on their IPTV.

Yeah; ISPs should be forced to advertise their 0.1th percentile speeds (aggregated over 60 second windows) as their topline upload and download numbers.

I once had a 100+ mbit comcast connection that couldn’t reliably do 2mbit in the evenings.

It is plenty, until you have to work with things like docker a lot, at which point downloading 1000 packages is normal.

Or if you have Steam, and every game wants to push 10-60 GB (!) updates every few weeks - this becomes a "leave the pc on for a few nights" ordeal. With 100 mbit/s, you give it 50mbit/s and an hour and everything is updated - all while you can keep working because you still have 50 mbit/s left.

Or if you have to quickly set up a Windows VM or other VM - not only is the download the longest process of setting it up, it will also happily update forever and hog the network.

Now assume you have 2-3 devices in the network, all doing backups, downloads, auto updates, and your 10-15 mbit/s connection is gone.

Good luck doing a backup, because residential 15 mbit/s download means 1.5mbit/s upload - you cant back up anything. Or stream your desktop. Or upload images in any reasonable amount of time.

You need ~25Mbps to stream 4k content.

I rarely steam more than 720p. Seems pointless for me personally, especially given I don't like wearing my glasses to watch TV.

It’s pretty much right on the money actually…

Our users in less digitally connected countries were insanely patient. The main problem was less the time than the cost, actually. The app required updates that were enormous. The cost to download them using the most common pay-as-you-go services in India represented a month of the local salary for day laborers… That information got hammered until developers learned to be more parsimonious.

I never heard anyone suggest that FAANG engineers had to forgo their monthly wage to download the test version of the app, but that probably would have triggered their empathy a little too much.

I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly.

Money. Same reason they won't show you your location on a map unless you turn on location tracking, even though there's a perfectly good GPS in the phone.

You know how designers like to say that users are always right? Well, not that guy.

I have had similar conversations with leads from Google News & Scholar. My impression is that when those people go to a conference or whatever they're they're to promote the company's outlook, not to listen. In the case of the news guy he when I pointed out some logical flaws in his argument (about why they didn't offer a way of sorting by date), he just switched to nodding while staring off into space and refusing to make eye contact, so he could give the appearance of listening without engaging further.

Google maps is a real-time social network that you don't realize you are a part of.

"This store is busiest at 6pm". "This area is less busy than usual". "There's a 5 minute delay ahead, but you're still on the fastest route".

All of that comes from data generated by online users. An offline user isn't providing value to Google, so why would they invest in those users?

Google Maps has pretty good support for offline maps. Select rectangular area, download, it expires after year. I am in Europe, maybe you have different copyright on data?

The support is terrible. You can only choose a rectangle with the same proportions as your screen and the allowed size is too small for a trip in lots of areas of the US. Like a lot of software there are restrictions that make no sense and are extremely user unfriendly.

I think now you can search for a city or something and download the offline map

You can. But you can’t download a large region like a whole state which makes long road trips a pain.

Apple Maps is even worse because it has no offline mode at all.

Idk when you tried it last, but it works for me on the iOS app. If you search for something that is a 'region' there should be a download offline map option.

In any case, before traveling I try to download the offline maps in HERE wego too.

Apple introduced offline support to maps in the most recent iOS update (I wanna say 17).

I've generally been really impressed with it. Would it be nice if I could pick a bigger area? Yeah. Would it be nice if I could choose the dimensions of my rectangle, or a non-rectangular shape like a state? Yeah.

But the fact that I can download a map that has all of New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware, and sizable chunks of 4 other states in that area for 890 MB is pretty awesome. Especially when it comes with full driving directions, business information including hours and the search capabilities? And it'll keep it up to date periodically? I'll take that win.

There’s no walking directions. But they can definitely do it. I was able to start a walking route on a hiking trail in Rocky Mountain National Park at 12k feet. Then switch into airplane mode and see exactly how far we had left.

All of that impossible if I didn’t have signal to start the walking route.

With Organic Maps (and Osmand and mapy.cz) I am able to download entire Poland, Belgium, Czech Republic and Slovakia. This was useful in my recent trips and can download more if needed.

I definitely can not do this with Google Maps.

Another vote for mapy.cz and their off-line capabilities.

Too bad their navigation does not care about traffic outside of Czechia. You can still use them for directions in a car, but no traffic jam avoidance.

You can also type a city name. Then type 'okmaps' and press ok. Then, it will bring up the download offline map screen for the whole area.

If you find it "pretty good", I guess you have never tried an OpenStreetMap-based app like Organic Maps. I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases).

> I also like OSMAnd a lot (I use both for different use-cases).

This is the first come I come across Organic Maps but I do use OSMAnd. I'm wondering how the two compare and would love to hear more about the use cases you have for each of them.

I use organic maps most of the time but osmand has much better support for hiking trails: you can see them (not just a path, but the name of the route, with a different color to separate it), I can tell the app to prefer it when building an itinerary, and the altitude info is way more detailed. You can spot the exact altitude and gradient at any spot. You can add a second map as an overlay, and I typically use a contour maps to quickly see where the peaks are, where the route will be flat, etc...

OSMand is slightly too powerful for everyday use, organic maps is the perfect good-enough, less-is-better example.

I find the UI in Organic Maps to be much nicer. OSMAnd seems to have a larger feature set and extensions and stuff you may or may not need/want/require. Navigation seem to add an announcement in OSMAnd whenever the OSM object for a road changes (seemingly), which leads to a number of totally unnecessary »Continue straight on road X«.

Those were a few differences I noticed.

I tell people OsmAnd is a swiss army knife that does everything for power users (the cyclists or hikers or drivers who find it really important to do a few specific things that most apps can't do) whereas Organic Maps is the app I actually recommend to family and friends as soon as I know that there's decent address coverage in their area (it's OSM only, so if an address POI doesn't exist in OSM it isn't searchable in OM. But volunteers and everyday users are adding new addresses all the time.)

I dowloaded Organic Maps ten minutes ago so take my comparison with a grain of salt. I could have missed some features in OM. Here we go:

Moving the map is much faster in OM than in OSMAnd. I hope that OSMAnd study the code of OM.

The visualization in OM is much nicer. Another thing to copy.

OM is extremely better at displaying POIs and their information. Again, copy it.

Despite the claims it seems that OM does not show walking and cycling routes. OSMAnd shows them with their name, that matches the one you see on signposts along the routes.

OM does not seem to have a way to record a route and save it as gpx. OSMAnd does that.

OM does not seem to have a way to place markers on the map. I use them to plan new routes for biking, then I follow the markers. Navigation would bring me where it wants to go through, not where I want to.

OM is less than half the size of OSMAnd but it's still 58 MB. I wonder why these mapping apps must be so large.

Having to dowload all the maps again is very bad. I wish there is a way to share them among apps but I think that Android makes it impossible, unless we want to use a folder on an external storage (SD card) or root the phone or whatever.

I'll keep using OSMAnd because of recording, markers and routes. However I might recommend OM to friends that only need a replacement for Google Maps.

The support got better: downloading is good. It should be usable now, but there are basic things that are not supported, like searching for something or finding a path. I typically don’t need to search: I know where for things are, but there aren't other ways to mark something on the map: favorites and stars don’t appear consistently, and pointing at things is completely useless when logged-in and disabled when off-line. So much of it feels like it was never tested.

My main issue is that there should be a way to say, “Keep this journey on screen until I explicitly delete it, with a confirmation model.” I’m assuming that’s what “Pin it” is meant to do, but in practice, I occasionally see the path I last searched when I reopen my phone and map; I never see a pinned journey again if anything happens: rotate the phone, a quick switch to another app, the screen goes dark…

Probably the same reason why they are showing hotels in the city I lived all my life, and have my home address set.

It's mindblowing how they don't set meaningful defaults with all that mountain of data they have.

Apple Maps in iOS 17 has good offline maps support:

- Full searching and POI details including hours, etc. - Full routing (no traffic of course, but possibly expected traffic? I'm not sure) - Freeform region selection, overlapping regions, etc.

Apple Maos was only relevant in the Bay Area when they launched. They had no meaningful details elsewhere; they didn’t have most street, told you the Louvre was open on Tuesdays and closed the weekend… “embarrassing” would not cover it.

They gradually increased the radius to bring hood and well documented in most of California, then some of the US coastline. I’m not sure where they are now, but I’d be surprised if they had basic things like public transport information, Nike lanes where I am. It’s never been a priority for Apple to serve an international audience.

Yes, I'm aware that Apple Maps was very different 11 years ago when it launched. While it still has a lesser POI database than Google, I would say in the areas where it has launched its in-house maps (Currently 20% by area, 11% by population - primarily lacking South America, Asia, and Africa)

You'll be happy to know that the Louvre is now marked as closed on Tuesdays, has a 94% positive rating, and its own 3D model

In France, Apple Maps has

- country-wide bike routing (accounts for the size of road, elevation, and prefers bike lanes where present)

- trains and busses (I can't say with certainty that every local bus will be present but the trains are)

- Paris will have detailed bus and bike lane markings directly on the map

I've attached a screenshot of public transit navigation in the greater Paris region:

Apple Maps: https://i.imgur.com/9n61j0F.jpg

Google Maps: https://i.imgur.com/uHHkYVZ.jpg

I would have to agree with the designer's I find it easy to download a map. I've done it in every single country I went to. But I have seen family members struggling because they didn't want to take the time to know how to do it (it could be a bad design but also laziness of users...)

Once you download it does anything actually work beyond viewing? Can you search? Can you ask for directions? I do download maps, and pay for roaming data, but I still would never completely rely on it in a new place because I'm bound to be out of network coverage at some point.

> I genuinely want to know what lead Google to not support Maps offline properly.

Perhaps Google's mapping business isn't so much showing maps but helping local businesses get found, rated, reviewed... (restaurants,shops etc).

I would love to do that offline too. Just suggest any cafe every two hours of walking, or a gas station every two hours of driving and I’ll stop there and nowhere else.

Off-topic, but I find it hard to believe that throttling Wifi could possibly encourage empathy. That sounds so petty to me, it's like removing printer toner and hoping that the office banter about the dysfunctional printer may somehow forge better team-spirit. Or, putting the stapler away so people go looking for it...

I think they probably mean empathy for users on slow Internet connections rather than for fellow staff. Basically making you test your software on a slow connection once a week.

While it's a good initiative, I don't think it works as this kind of throttling almost never simulates a real spotty and crap connection.

More tech companies should do this, and they should do more of it. On Empathy Days, iOS/Android software engineers should have to "live on" 6 year old phones, and desktop software developers should have to use laptops with 8GB RAM and 15" screens as their daily drivers. And Internet throttling should both reduce bandwidth and introduce random latencies and connection drops.

Too many developers just assume their users are on this year's phones and supercomputer specced desktops with three 4K 27 inch monitors and write their software to perform well on those systems.

Man I feel so called out haha. I use a laptop with 8GB RAM and 15" as my daily. Also have a crap old smartphone.

I think I need to change my ways

I'd gather its empathy for the customers with those constraints, as in, if the product you're building is having issues in this context then you may rethink perf of this or that feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com